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.

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.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort in a hospital.

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

Because the newer methods of treatment are good, it does not follow that the old ones were bad: for if our honorable and worshipful ancestors had not recovered from their ailments, you and I would not be here today.