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

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.

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.”

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

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.

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

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

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.

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

There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.