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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.

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

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

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.