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

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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.”

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

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.

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.”

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

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

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

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.

A miracle drug is any drug that will do what the label says it will do.