Doctors don’t know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in spirit.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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

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.

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

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

All pain is one malady with many names.

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

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.

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

If a patient is poor, he is committed to a public hospital as “psychotic”; if he can afford the luxury of a private sanitarium, he is put there with the diagnosis of “neurasthenia”; if he is wealthy enough to be isolated in his own home under constant watch of nurses and physicians, he is simply an indisposed “eccentric.”