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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

When the physician said to him, “You have lived to be an old man,” he said, “That is because I never employed you as my physician.”