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.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

All pain is one malady with many names.

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

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

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.

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

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

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.

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.”