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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.

Let the young know they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient himself.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.