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.

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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.”

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

All pain is one malady with many names.

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.

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