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.”

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

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

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

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.”

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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 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.

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

All pain is one malady with many names.

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

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