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

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

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.

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.

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

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.

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

The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.

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.

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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