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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.”

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

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

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.

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.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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.

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