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.

He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

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.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.