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.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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

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 be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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.

Physician, heal yourself: thus you help your patient too. Let his best help be to see with his own eyes the man who makes himself well.

All pain is one malady with many names.

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

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.

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

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