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.

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.

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

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

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.”

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.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

Medication alone is not to be relied on. In one half the cases medicine is not needed, or is worse than useless. Obedience to spiritual and physical laws—hygiene of the body and hygiene of the spirit—is the surest warrant for health and happiness.

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

All pain is one malady with many names.

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.

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.