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.

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

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

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

Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

All pain is one malady with many names.

Health indeed is a precious thing, to recover and preserve which we undergo any misery, drink bitter potions, freely give our goods—restore a man to his health, his purse lies open to thee.

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

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

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

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

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.