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.

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

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.

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

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

Because the newer methods of treatment are good, it does not follow that the old ones were bad: for if our honorable and worshipful ancestors had not recovered from their ailments, you and I would not be here today.

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

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.”

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.

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

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.

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.