Physician, heal yourself: thus you help your patient too. Let his best help be to see with his own eyes the man who makes himself well.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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

The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.

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.

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.”

Because the newer methods of treatment are good, it does not follow that the old ones were bad: for if our honorable and worshipful ancestors had not recovered from their ailments, you and I would not be here today.

All pain is one malady with many names.

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.

When the physician said to him, “You have lived to be an old man,” he said, “That is because I never employed you as my physician.”

No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.