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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

All pain is one malady with many names.

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

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

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

If a patient is poor, he is committed to a public hospital as “psychotic”; if he can afford the luxury of a private sanitarium, he is put there with the diagnosis of “neurasthenia”; if he is wealthy enough to be isolated in his own home under constant watch of nurses and physicians, he is simply an indisposed “eccentric.”

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.”