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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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