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.

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

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.

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

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

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.

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 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.

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

Physician, heal yourself: thus you help your patient too. Let his best help be to see with his own eyes the man who makes himself well.