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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Well now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.

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

Health indeed is a precious thing, to recover and preserve which we undergo any misery, drink bitter potions, freely give our goods—restore a man to his health, his purse lies open to thee.