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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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