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.”

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.

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.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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.

All pain is one malady with many names.

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.

Be temperate in wine, in eating, girls, and sloth, or the Gout will seize you.

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.

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