I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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.

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

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

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.”

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.”