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

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.

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

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

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 be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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