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

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.

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

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

All pain is one malady with many names.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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 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.