You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

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.

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.”

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.

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

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

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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

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.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.