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.

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 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.

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

A miracle drug is any drug that will do what the label says it will do.

Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.

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.

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

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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.