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

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.”

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

The physician should look upon the patient as a besieged city and try to rescue him with every means that art and science place at his command.

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.

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.

The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.

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.