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.

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.

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

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

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.”

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

Let the young know they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient himself.

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

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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.”