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

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.”

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.”