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

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.”

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

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

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.

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

All pain is one malady with many names.

I have yet, I believe, some years in store, for I have a good state of health and a happy mind, and I take care of both by nourishing the first with temperance and the latter with abundance. This, I believe, you will allow to be the true philosophy of life.

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

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.

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

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

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.