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

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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.

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