You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.

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.”

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

All pain is one malady with many names.

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.

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.

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

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

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