To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.”

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.

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

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

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