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.

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.

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.

Well now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.

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

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.

There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.

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.

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.

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