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

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.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.”

I have yet, I believe, some years in store, for I have a good state of health and a happy mind, and I take care of both by nourishing the first with temperance and the latter with abundance. This, I believe, you will allow to be the true philosophy of life.

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

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