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

Because the newer methods of treatment are good, it does not follow that the old ones were bad: for if our honorable and worshipful ancestors had not recovered from their ailments, you and I would not be here today.

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.