In the name of Hippocrates doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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.”

All pain is one malady with many names.

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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