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

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

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

All pain is one malady with many names.