William Osler Quotes
The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.
The person who takes medicine must recover twice, once from the disease and once from the medicine.
Gentlemen, I have a confession to make. Half of what we have taught you is in error, and furthermore we cannot tell you which half it is
The practice of medicine is an art, not a trade; a calling, not a business; a calling in which your heart will be exercised equally with your head.
He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all.
The trained nurse has become one of the great blessings of humanity, taking a place beside the physician and the priest.
Acquire the art of detachment, the virtue of method, and the quality of thoroughness, but above all the grace of humility.
Observe, record, tabulate, communicate. Use your five senses. Learn to see, learn to hear, learn to feel, learn to smell, and know that by practice alone you can become expert.
No human being is constituted to know the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition.
The young doctor should look about early for an avocation, a pastime, that will take him away from patients, pills, and potions.
The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.
Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day absorb all your interest, energy and enthusiasm. The best preparation for tomorrow is to live today superbly well.
In science, the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.
There are only two sorts of doctors; those who practise with their brains, and those who practise with their tongues.
To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals - this alone is worth the struggle.
The young physician starts life with 20 drugs for each disease, and the old physician ends life with one drug for 20 diseases.
The successful teacher is no longer on a height, pumping knowledge at high pressure into passive receptacles.
Patients rarely die of the disease from which they suffer. Secondary or terminal infections are the real cause of death.
Nothing will sustain you more potently than the power to recognize in your humdrum routine, as perhaps it may be thought, the true poetry of life.
It is not as if our homeopathic brothers are asleep: far from it, they are awake - many of them at any rate - to the importance of the scientific study of disease.
No bubble is so iridescent or floats longer than that blown by the successful teacher.
Too many men slip early out of the habit of studious reading, and yet that is essential.
One special advantage of the skeptical attitude of mind is that a man is never vexed to find that after all he has been in the wrong.
Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition.
If it were not for the great variability among individuals, medicine might as well be a science, not an art.
It is much simpler to buy books than to read them and easier to read them than to absorb their contents.
Humanity has but three great enemies: fever, famine, and war; of these by far the greatest, by far the most terrible, is fever.
To confess ignorance is often wiser than to beat about the bush with a hypothetical diagnosis.
We are all dietetic sinners; only a small percent of what we eat nourishes us; the balance goes to waste and loss of energy.
Work is the open sesame of every portal, the great equalizer in the world, the true philosopher's stone which transmutes all the base metal of humanity into gold.
In seeking absolute truth we aim at the unattainable and must be content with broken portions.
