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.

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

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.

All pain is one malady with many names.

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.

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

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

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

If a patient is poor, he is committed to a public hospital as “psychotic”; if he can afford the luxury of a private sanitarium, he is put there with the diagnosis of “neurasthenia”; if he is wealthy enough to be isolated in his own home under constant watch of nurses and physicians, he is simply an indisposed “eccentric.”

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

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

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.