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.”

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.”

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

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

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

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

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