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

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

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.”

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

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.

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.

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

Be temperate in wine, in eating, girls, and sloth, or the Gout will seize you.

In the name of Hippocrates doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.

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

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.

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