"... Mr. Nussey, the king's apothecary, ... whom I knew very intimately later in life, told me that the king confided to him all his secrets, and the knowledge, if written down, would set all England in a blaze. He was with the royal patient to the last, the king never letting go of his hand for twenty-four hours, which gave him an agony of cramp all but insupportable."

“In those days, and long after, an English clergyman dressed like a gentleman; he now wears a black livery, and he looks like a bishop's footman, in mourning, with his master, for some dead archbishop.”

“The more a writer deviates from simplicity, the less sincere he appears.”

“It may be boasted that free-trade in physic came before free-trade in corn, and from that time medical science began to flourish in this country.”

“It is my purpose in writing these Memoirs to adhere rigidly to truth, at least in its essence. Should I succeed in this, my work would be a very remarkable one, almost unique.”

“Nothing that has been and has died out, will be revived. The skeleton, an osseous Apollo, will remain, and that is all.”

“Dr. Thomas Young, the illustrious inventor of the Undulatory Theory of Light, was then a physician at St. George's. I used to go round the wards with him. He was thought to be very undecided in his opinions of a case; the fact is, medicine is so uncertain a science, it was not good enough for such an intellect as his to work on.”