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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.”

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

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.