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

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.”

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.