I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

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

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

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.