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

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.

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

All pain is one malady with many names.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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

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.”

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.

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

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

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.