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.

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.

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

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.”

Medication alone is not to be relied on. In one half the cases medicine is not needed, or is worse than useless. Obedience to spiritual and physical laws—hygiene of the body and hygiene of the spirit—is the surest warrant for health and happiness.

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

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

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.

All pain is one malady with many names.

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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