Top 141 Quotes & Sayings by William Osler
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Canadian scientist William Osler.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.
One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.
In seeking absolute truth we aim at the unattainable and must be content with broken portions.
The best preparation for tomorrow is to do today's work superbly well.
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 greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.
There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language.
The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and to beget.
It is much simpler to buy books than to read them and easier to read them than to absorb their contents.
The future is today.
The value of experience is not in seeing much, but in seeing wisely.
The teacher's life should have three periods, study until twenty-five, investigation until forty, profession until sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance.
No bubble is so iridescent or floats longer than that blown by the successful teacher.
We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from life.
The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.
The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.
He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all.
There are, in truth, no specialties in medicine, since to know fully many of the most important diseases a man must be familiar with their manifestations in many organs.
The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.
The first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.
To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals - this alone is worth the struggle.
Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease.
The young physician starts life with 20 drugs for each disease, and the old physician ends life with one drug for 20 diseases.
Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.
There is no disease more conducive to clinical humility than aneurysm of the aorta.
What is the student but a lover courting a fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp?
The very first step towards success in any occupation is to become interested in it.
Soap and water and common sense are the best disinfectants.
Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought.
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.
To study the phenomena of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.
There are only two sorts of doctors; those who practise with their brains, and those who practise with their tongues.
The practice of medicine will be very much as you make it - to one a worry, a care, a perpetual annoyance; to another, a daily job and a life of as much happiness and usefulness as can well fall to the lot of man, because it is a life of self-sacrifice and of countless opportunities to comfort and help the weak-hearted, and to raise up those that fall.
He who knows syphilis knows medicine
Every patient you see is a lesson in much more than the malady from which he suffers.
The person who takes medicine must recover twice, once from the disease and once from the medicine.
There are three classes of human beings: men, women and women physicians.
The hardest conviction to get into the mind of a beginner is that the education upon which he is engaged is not a college course, not a medical course, but a life course, for which the work of a few years under teachers is but a preparation.
The trained nurse has become one of the great blessings of humanity, taking a place beside the physician and the priest.
Half of us are blind, few of us feel, and we are all deaf.
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.
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.
Care more for the individual patient than for the special features of the disease. . . . Put yourself in his place . . . The kindly word, the cheerful greeting, the sympathetic look - these the patient understands.
Be calm and strong and patient. Meet failure and disappointment with courage. Rise superior to the trials of life, and never give in to hopelessness or despair. In danger, in adversity, cling to your principles and ideals. Aequanimitas!
Without faith a man can do nothing; with it all things are possible.
To confess ignorance is often wiser than to beat about the bush with a hypothetical diagnosis.
The young doctor should look about early for an avocation, a pastime, that will take him away from patients, pills, and potions.
Think not of the amount to be accomplished, the difficulties to be overcome, or the end to be attained, but set earnestly at the little task at your elbow, letting that be sufficient for the day.
Happiness lies in the absorption in some vocation which satisfies the soul.
Things cannot always go your way. Learn to accept in silence the minor aggravations, cultivate the gift of taciturnity and consume your own smoke with an extra draught of hard work, so that those about you may not be annoyed with the dust and soot of your complaints.
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. Often the best part of your work will have nothing to do with potions and powders, but with the exercise of an influence of the strong upon the weak, of the righteous upon the wicked, of the wise upon the foolish.
Medicine is learned by the bedside and not in the classroom. Let not your conceptions of disease come from words heard in the lecture room or read from the book. See, and then reason and compare and control. But see first.
Advice is sought to confirm a position already taken.
Acquire the art of detachment, the virtue of method, and the quality of thoroughness, but above all the grace of humility.
The most essential thing for happiness is the gift of friendship.
To do today's work well and not to bother about tomorrow is the secret of accomplishment
Listen to your patient, he is telling you the diagnosis.
A physician who treats himself has a fool for a patient.
If it were not for the great variability among individuals, medicine might as well be a science, not an art.
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