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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

Doctors don’t know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in spirit.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

The physician should look upon the patient as a besieged city and try to rescue him with every means that art and science place at his command.

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

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.