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

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.

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

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.”

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.

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

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

All pain is one malady with many names.

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.

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

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

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.