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.

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.”

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.

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.

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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.

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.

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

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

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