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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.”

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

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.”

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 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.

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