You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.

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

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

The doctor occupies a seat in the front row of the stalls of the human drama, and is constantly watching and even intervening in the tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies which form the raw material of the literary art.

Doctors don’t know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in spirit.