Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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