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

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.”

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

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.

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

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.”

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

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.

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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 poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.