I have yet, I believe, some years in store, for I have a good state of health and a happy mind, and I take care of both by nourishing the first with temperance and the latter with abundance. This, I believe, you will allow to be the true philosophy of life.

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

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.”

All pain is one malady with many names.

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.

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.

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

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

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.

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.