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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Medication alone is not to be relied on. In one half the cases medicine is not needed, or is worse than useless. Obedience to spiritual and physical laws—hygiene of the body and hygiene of the spirit—is the surest warrant for health and happiness.

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

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

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.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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