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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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

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

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