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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.”

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

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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.”

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

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.

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