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.

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

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.