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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.”