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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.

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.

All pain is one malady with many names.