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.

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.

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

Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.

Well now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.

All pain is one malady with many names.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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