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.”

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

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

All pain is one malady with many names.

No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.

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.

Be temperate in wine, in eating, girls, and sloth, or the Gout will seize you.

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.

Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

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.

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

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

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.