There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.

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.

All pain is one malady with many names.

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

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.

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.

Be temperate in wine, in eating, girls, and sloth, or the Gout will seize you.

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.”

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.”

Health indeed is a precious thing, to recover and preserve which we undergo any misery, drink bitter potions, freely give our goods—restore a man to his health, his purse lies open to thee.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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.

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