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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

When the physician said to him, “You have lived to be an old man,” he said, “That is because I never employed you as my physician.”

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.

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 doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.

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