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.

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.

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.

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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.”

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

All pain is one malady with many names.

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

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

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