I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

When the physician said to him, “You have lived to be an old man,” he said, “That is because I never employed you as my physician.”

No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.

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