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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Health indeed is a precious thing, to recover and preserve which we undergo any misery, drink bitter potions, freely give our goods—restore a man to his health, his purse lies open to thee.

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

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.”

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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