A miracle drug is any drug that will do what the label says it will do.

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

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

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.”

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

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

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.

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.

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.

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.

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