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.

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

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.

All pain is one malady with many names.

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.

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.

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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

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