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

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

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.

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

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.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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.

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

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

It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.