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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.”

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

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

He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.