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

When the physician said to him, “You have lived to be an old man,” he said, “That is because I never employed you as my physician.”

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.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

Well now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.

Health indeed is a precious thing, to recover and preserve which we undergo any misery, drink bitter potions, freely give our goods—restore a man to his health, his purse lies open to thee.

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

The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.

Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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