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.

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.

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

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

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.

All pain is one malady with many names.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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.

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