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

All pain is one malady with many names.

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

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.

The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.

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

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.

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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.