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.

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.

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

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

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.”

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

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

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

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.

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.”

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

All pain is one malady with many names.