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

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 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.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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.

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 poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.

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

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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.