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.

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.”

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Be temperate in wine, in eating, girls, and sloth, or the Gout will seize you.

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.