All pain is one malady with many names.

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.

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

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.”

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.