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

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

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.

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.

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

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.

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.”

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.”

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

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

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

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.