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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A miracle drug is any drug that will do what the label says it will do.