Let the young know they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient himself.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

All pain is one malady with many names.

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.

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

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

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.”