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

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

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.

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 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.

Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.

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.

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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.