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.

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.

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

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

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

Well now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.

Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

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.

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.