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.”

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.”

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

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

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

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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.

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

He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

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.