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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

All pain is one malady with many names.

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.

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

No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.

Let the young know they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient himself.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.”

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.

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

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