You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.

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

Doctors don’t know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in spirit.

The doctor occupies a seat in the front row of the stalls of the human drama, and is constantly watching and even intervening in the tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies which form the raw material of the literary art.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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.”

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.

All pain is one malady with many names.

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

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.

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

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