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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.”

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

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

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

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