I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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

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

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

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