I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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