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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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

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

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

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.

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