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

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.

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

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

In the name of Hippocrates doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.

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

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.

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.

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

All pain is one malady with many names.

Physician, heal yourself: thus you help your patient too. Let his best help be to see with his own eyes the man who makes himself well.