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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Well now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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.

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.

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.