Be temperate in wine, in eating, girls, and sloth, or the Gout will seize you.

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.

Well now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.

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

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.

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.

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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

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

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.