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 am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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.”

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.