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

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.”

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

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.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.