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.

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

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.

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 be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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.

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.

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

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.