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

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.

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

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.

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

I have yet, I believe, some years in store, for I have a good state of health and a happy mind, and I take care of both by nourishing the first with temperance and the latter with abundance. This, I believe, you will allow to be the true philosophy of life.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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