The doctor occupies a seat in the front row of the stalls of the human drama, and is constantly watching and even intervening in the tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies which form the raw material of the literary art.

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

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.

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.

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.”

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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.

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.

All pain is one malady with many names.

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

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.