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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.”