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.

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

Doctors don’t know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in spirit.

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.”

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

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

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.

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

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.”

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 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.