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.

All pain is one malady with many names.

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

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

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.”

How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort in a hospital.

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

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

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.

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

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