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

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

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.

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

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort in a hospital.

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

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.”

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.