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

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

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.

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

In the name of Hippocrates doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”