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.

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

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.

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

Physician, heal yourself: thus you help your patient too. Let his best help be to see with his own eyes the man who makes himself well.

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 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.

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

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

All pain is one malady with many names.

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