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

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

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.”

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.