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 doctor occupies a seat in the front row of the stalls of the human drama, and is constantly watching and even intervening in the tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies which form the raw material of the literary art.

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

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.”

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

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

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

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

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.