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.”

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

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.

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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.

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