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

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.

Doctors don’t know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in spirit.

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.

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.

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

The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.

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

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.

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.”

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.