I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

Let the young know they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient himself.

All pain is one malady with many names.

The doctor occupies a seat in the front row of the stalls of the human drama, and is constantly watching and even intervening in the tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies which form the raw material of the literary art.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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.”

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.