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

All pain is one malady with many names.

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.

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.

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.

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

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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

It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.