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

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

All pain is one malady with many names.

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

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

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.

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

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.