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.”

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

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

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

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

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 poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

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.