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

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.

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.

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

Be temperate in wine, in eating, girls, and sloth, or the Gout will seize you.

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

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

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

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

The best physician is he who can distinguish the possible from the impossible.

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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