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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.”

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.”

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

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.