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.

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

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

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

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

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

When the physician said to him, “You have lived to be an old man,” he said, “That is because I never employed you as my physician.”

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

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.

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

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