If a patient is poor, he is committed to a public hospital as “psychotic”; if he can afford the luxury of a private sanitarium, he is put there with the diagnosis of “neurasthenia”; if he is wealthy enough to be isolated in his own home under constant watch of nurses and physicians, he is simply an indisposed “eccentric.”

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

All pain is one malady with many names.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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.

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