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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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.

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

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

All pain is one malady with many names.

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

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.

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.”

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

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.

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