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

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

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.

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

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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