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.

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

The physician should look upon the patient as a besieged city and try to rescue him with every means that art and science place at his command.

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

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.”

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.