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

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.

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.”

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

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.

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

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort in a hospital.

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

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

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