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.

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

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.

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.

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

How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort in a hospital.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.