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

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.

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

The physician should look upon the patient as a besieged city and try to rescue him with every means that art and science place at his command.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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

It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.

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.

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.”

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.

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.