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

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

Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

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

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

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.

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.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

Be temperate in wine, in eating, girls, and sloth, or the Gout will seize you.

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.”

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