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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

All pain is one malady with many names.

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.

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