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.

The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.

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.

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.

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.

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

The physician should look upon the patient as a besieged city and try to rescue him with every means that art and science place at his command.

All pain is one malady with many names.

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

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.”

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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.

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