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

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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.

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.

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

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

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

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.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.