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

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

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

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.

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

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.

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.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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.