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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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.

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.”

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 doctor occupies a seat in the front row of the stalls of the human drama, and is constantly watching and even intervening in the tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies which form the raw material of the literary art.

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

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

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.”