Gout produces calculus in the kidney... the patient has frequently to entertain the painful speculation as to whether gout or stone be the worst disease. Sometimes the stone, on passing, kills the patient, without waiting for the gout.

The generality have considered that disease is but a confused and disordered effort in Nature, thrown down from her proper state, and defending herself in vain.

As no man can say who it was that first invented the use of clothes and houses against the inclemency of the weather, so also can no investigator point out the origin of Medicine - mysterious as the source of the Nile.

In writing the history of a disease, every philosophical hypothesis whatsoever, that has previously occupied the mind of the author, should lie in abeyance.

The arrival of a good clown exercises a more beneficial influence upon the health of a town than twenty asses laden with drugs.

Acute [diseases] meaning those of which God is the author, chronic meaning those that originate in ourselves.

Physick, says Sydenham, is not to bee learned by going to Universities, but hee is for taking apprentices; and says one had as good send a man to Oxford to learn shoemaking as practising physick.