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.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

Because the newer methods of treatment are good, it does not follow that the old ones were bad: for if our honorable and worshipful ancestors had not recovered from their ailments, you and I would not be here today.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

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.

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

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.

I have yet, I believe, some years in store, for I have a good state of health and a happy mind, and I take care of both by nourishing the first with temperance and the latter with abundance. This, I believe, you will allow to be the true philosophy of life.

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.”

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.

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

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