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

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.”

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

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

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

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

Well now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.

The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.

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.

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

All pain is one malady with many names.