If a patient is poor, he is committed to a public hospital as “psychotic”; if he can afford the luxury of a private sanitarium, he is put there with the diagnosis of “neurasthenia”; if he is wealthy enough to be isolated in his own home under constant watch of nurses and physicians, he is simply an indisposed “eccentric.”

He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort in a hospital.

A miracle drug is any drug that will do what the label says it will do.

The physician should look upon the patient as a besieged city and try to rescue him with every means that art and science place at his command.

The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.

Medication alone is not to be relied on. In one half the cases medicine is not needed, or is worse than useless. Obedience to spiritual and physical laws—hygiene of the body and hygiene of the spirit—is the surest warrant for health and happiness.

Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.

We have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering.

Let the young know they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient himself.

It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.