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

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.”

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.

When the physician said to him, “You have lived to be an old man,” he said, “That is because I never employed you as my physician.”

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.