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.

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.”

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.”

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.