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

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

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.

Well now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.

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.

We have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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.”

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

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.

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

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