To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.

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.”

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

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

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.

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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

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.

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