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.

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

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

Physician, heal yourself: thus you help your patient too. Let his best help be to see with his own eyes the man who makes himself well.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.

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

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

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

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