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

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.

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

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

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

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

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.

Medication alone is not to be relied on. In one half the cases medicine is not needed, or is worse than useless. Obedience to spiritual and physical laws—hygiene of the body and hygiene of the spirit—is the surest warrant for health and happiness.

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.

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.

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.