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.”

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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.

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.

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.

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

Well now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.

All pain is one malady with many names.

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.

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.”