To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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.

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

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.”

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

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

I reckon being ill as one of the greatest pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work until one is better.

Be temperate in wine, in eating, girls, and sloth, or the Gout will seize you.

I have yet, I believe, some years in store, for I have a good state of health and a happy mind, and I take care of both by nourishing the first with temperance and the latter with abundance. This, I believe, you will allow to be the true philosophy of life.

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.

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

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.

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