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.

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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.

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.

All pain is one malady with many names.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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