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

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

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

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.

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.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.”