Lapham’s Quarterly

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.

Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

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.

All pain is one malady with many names.

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

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

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

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.”

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.