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

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

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.

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.”

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.

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

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

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.”