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.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

We have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering.

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.

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

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.

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

All pain is one malady with many names.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.”

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.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.