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

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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

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

Let the young know they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient himself.

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

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

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.