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

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.

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.

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

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

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

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

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.

All pain is one malady with many names.

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.

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