In the name of Hippocrates doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.

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

All pain is one malady with many names.

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.”

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

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

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.

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

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.

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.