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.”

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.”

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

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.

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

He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.