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

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

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

When the physician said to him, “You have lived to be an old man,” he said, “That is because I never employed you as my physician.”

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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