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

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.”

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

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.

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.

Well now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.

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

Doctors don’t know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in spirit.

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.

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

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

The physician should look upon the patient as a besieged city and try to rescue him with every means that art and science place at his command.