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.”

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.

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

The doctor occupies a seat in the front row of the stalls of the human drama, and is constantly watching and even intervening in the tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies which form the raw material of the literary art.

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

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

All pain is one malady with many names.

Doctors don’t know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in spirit.

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

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.

The best physician is he who can distinguish the possible from the impossible.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

Well now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.