Because the newer methods of treatment are good, it does not follow that the old ones were bad: for if our honorable and worshipful ancestors had not recovered from their ailments, you and I would not be here today.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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