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.

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

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.”