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

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

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.

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.”

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

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

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

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.

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.”

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