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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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

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

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.”