Charlotte Perkins Gilman on health

John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.

If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression,⁠—a slight hysterical tendency,⁠—what is one to do?

John is a physician, and perhaps⁠—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)⁠—perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.

The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.

Kurt Vonnegut1922–2007Preface (p. xi)

The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.

Mark Twain1835–1910“Following the Equator: Pudd’s ahead Wilson’s New Calendar”, as quoted in Medicine in Quotations: Views of Health and Disease Through the Ages (2006), p. 146

The mistakes made by doctors are innumerable. They err habitually on the side of optimism as to treatment, of pessimism as to the outcome.

Marcel Proust1871–1922