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

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.”

Doctors don’t know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in spirit.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.

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.

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