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

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.”

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.”

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

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.