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.

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

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.

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

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

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

We have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering.

Doctors don’t know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in spirit.

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 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 be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.