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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.