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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.