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

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

All pain is one malady with many names.

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.