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.”

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

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.

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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.”

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.

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

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 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.

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

The best physician is he who can distinguish the possible from the impossible.

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