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

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

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.”

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 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.

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

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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.

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.

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