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

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

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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.”

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

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

No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.

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

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.