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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

All pain is one malady with many names.

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

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.