You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.