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.

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

Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.

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

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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.”

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

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.

The doctor occupies a seat in the front row of the stalls of the human drama, and is constantly watching and even intervening in the tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies which form the raw material of the literary art.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.