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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.”

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.

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.

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

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

In the name of Hippocrates doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.

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.