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.

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

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

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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

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

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.

All pain is one malady with many names.

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.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.