I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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

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

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.”

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.