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

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.”

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

Well now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.

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

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.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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.

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.”

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

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.