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.”

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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

No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.

All pain is one malady with many names.

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

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.

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.

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

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.

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