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

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

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

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

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.

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.”

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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.

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

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.