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

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.

All pain is one malady with many names.

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 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 poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.

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

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

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

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

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.

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