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

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.”

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.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

All pain is one malady with many names.

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.

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.

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

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.

How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort in a hospital.

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

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