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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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.

He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

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.

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.”