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.

I have yet, I believe, some years in store, for I have a good state of health and a happy mind, and I take care of both by nourishing the first with temperance and the latter with abundance. This, I believe, you will allow to be the true philosophy of life.

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

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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.

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.”

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

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.

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.