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

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.

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.

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.”

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

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

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.

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

All pain is one malady with many names.

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.

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

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