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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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