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.

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.

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.

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

Be temperate in wine, in eating, girls, and sloth, or the Gout will seize you.

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.