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

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

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

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

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.

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.

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

It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.

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

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.

The doctor occupies a seat in the front row of the stalls of the human drama, and is constantly watching and even intervening in the tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies which form the raw material of the literary art.