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.

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.

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.

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

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.

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

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.”

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.

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

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