- “We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from life.”
- “Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.”
- “He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all.”
- “Listen to your patient – he is telling you the diagnosis.”
- “The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.”
- “The person who takes medicine must recover twice, once from the disease and once from the medicine.”
- “One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.”
- “The value of experience is not in seeing much, but in seeing wisely.”
- “It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has”.
- “The young physician starts life with 20 drugs for each disease, and the old physician ends life with one drug for 20 diseases”.
- “There are, in truth, no specialties in medicine, since to know fully many of the most important diseases a man must be familiar with their manifestations in many organs”.