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.

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

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

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.

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

Physician, heal yourself: thus you help your patient too. Let his best help be to see with his own eyes the man who makes himself well.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

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.”

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.

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.

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