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.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

All pain is one malady with many names.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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