Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

Medication alone is not to be relied on. In one half the cases medicine is not needed, or is worse than useless. Obedience to spiritual and physical laws—hygiene of the body and hygiene of the spirit—is the surest warrant for health and happiness.

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

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.