After two days in the hospital, I took a turn for the nurse.

America is a constipated nation.... If you pass small stools, you have to have large hospitals.

First need in the reform of hospital management? That's easy! The death of all dietitians, and the resurrection of a French chef.

In a word, I consider hospitals only as the entrance to scientific medicine; they are the first field of observation which a physician enters; but the true sanctuary of medical science is a laboratory; only there can he seek explanations of life in the normal and pathological states by means of experimental analysis.

In the sick room, ten cents' worth of human understanding equals ten dollars' worth of medical science.

It is the unqualified result of all my experience with the sick that, second only to their need of fresh air, is their need of light; that, after a close room, what hurts them most is a dark room and that it is not only light but direct sunlight they want.

It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a Hospital that it should do the sick no harm.

South Africa might be called the Daughter of Medicine. For was not the fight against scurvy the very reason for the establishment of the settlement at the Cape with its garden and hospital?

The development of statistics are causing history to be rewritten. Till recently the historian studied nations in the aggregate, and gave us only the story of princes, dynasties, sieges, and battles. Of the people themselves—the great social body with life, growth, sources, elements, and laws of its own—he told us nothing. Now statistical inquiry leads him into the hovels, homes, workshops, mines, fields, prisons, hospitals, and all places where human nature displays its weakness and strength. In these explorations he discovers the seeds of national growth and decay, and thus becomes the prophet of his generation.

The hospital is the only proper College in which to rear a true disciple of Aesculapius.

The only equipment lack in the modern hospital? Somebody to meet you at the entrance with a handshake!

There has never been just 'coach class' health care, but with these amenities you are seeing people get priorities according to your ability to pay. It's one thing to say you get perks; it's another to say you can buy your way to the head of the line.

There is no bed shortage—most people have their own.

Too often a sister puts all her patients back to bed as a housewife puts all her plates back in the plate-rack—to make a generally tidy appearance.

We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity.