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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

All pain is one malady with many names.