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.”

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

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

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.

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.

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.”

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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

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

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

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.

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