Physician, heal yourself: thus you help your patient too. Let his best help be to see with his own eyes the man who makes himself well.

The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.

Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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.”

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

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

The doctor occupies a seat in the front row of the stalls of the human drama, and is constantly watching and even intervening in the tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies which form the raw material of the literary art.

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.

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

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.