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.”

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

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.

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

Let the young know they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient himself.

Well now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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