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

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.

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

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