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

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

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.”

All pain is one malady with many names.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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