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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.