He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

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.

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

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

The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.

We have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”