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

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

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

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

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

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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.

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

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.

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.