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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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.