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 am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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

Well now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.

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.”

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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