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.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.

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.”

Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.

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