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.

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

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

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.

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.”

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

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.

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.

Physician, heal yourself: thus you help your patient too. Let his best help be to see with his own eyes the man who makes himself well.

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.

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

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

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