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

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 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.

All pain is one malady with many names.

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

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

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

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.”

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.

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

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

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.