I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

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.

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