Then we started clinical work ... and I just wasn't suited to that. I didn't like ... the whole structure of a teaching hospital. That is, I felt very much that treating patients as things is the wrong thing. And since I thought it was very hard to be a scientist and not do this, then I preferred not to do it at all. So, in fact, I think I am the only person who has ever passed medicine who had never seen a patient until his examination — because I never went. And, in fact, one of the great stories is that I failed my medicine because I was asked to smell this patient's breath and correctly diagnosed Macleans toothpaste where I should have diagnosed acetone.

See you, my dear doctor, me, I am not one to rely upon the expert procedure. It is the psychology I seek, not the fingerprint or the cigarette ash.

But when ill indeed,
E'en dismissing the doctor don't always succeed.

If a doctor isn't 'up' on something, he's 'down' on it.

The only good leader is a reluctant one.

But she was one of those doctors who hadn’t gotten the memo from the American health-care system that says that you should only listen to a patient for three minutes, tops, before writing him a referral and/or a prescription and firing him out the door just as the next patient was being fired in.

Convinced myself, I seek not to convince.

There is nothing which we receive with so much reluctance as advice.

One of the reasons many physicians feel drained by their work is that they do not know how to make an opening to receive anything from their patients. The way we were trained, receiving is considered unprofessional. The way most of us were raised, receiving is considered a weakness.

Well, first of all, let me say that I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years. It was one of those phobias that really didn’t pay off.

The problem for a Paracelsian physician like me is that I see diseases as disguises in which people present me with their wretchedness.

But I am a Skeptic and I am professionally unattuned to believing in surfaces.

Isn’t it a bit unnerving that doctors call what they do “practice”?

I've always resisted the idea of becoming a David Hasselhoff, and I hope I'm still resisting it.