William Osler Quotes
-
The great majority gave no signs one way or the other; like birth, their death was a sleep and a forgetting.
-
The future belongs to Science. More and more she will control the destinies of the nations. Already she has them in her crucible and on her balances.
-
It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.
-
Patients rarely die of the disease from which they suffer. Secondary or terminal infections are the real cause of death.
-
Patients should have rest, food, fresh air, and exercise - the quadrangle of health.
-
Avoid wine and women - choose a freckly-faced girl for a wife; they are invariably more amiable.
-
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.
-
The young physician starts life with 20 drugs for each disease, and the old physician ends life with one drug for 20 diseases.
-
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.
-
A library represents the mind of its collector, his fancies and foibles, his strength and weakness, his prejudices and preferences. Particularly is this the case if, to the character of a collector, he adds - or tries to add - the qualities of a student who wishes to know the books and the lives of the men who wrote them. The friendships of his life, the phases of his growth, the vagaries of his mind, all are represented.
-
The value of experience is not in seeing much, but in seeing wisely.
-
Soap and water and common sense are the best disinfectants.
-
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.
-
Shed, as you do your garments, your daily sins, whether of omission or commission, and you will wake a free man, with a new life.
-
It is strange how the memory of a man may float to posterity on what he would have himself regarded as the most trifling of his works.
-
It is not... That some people do not know what to do with truth when it is offered to them, But the tragic fate is to reach, after patient search, a condition of mind-blindness, in which. The truth is not recognized, though it stares you in the face.
-
The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.
-
The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and beget.
-
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.
-
One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.
-
Listen to your patient, he is telling you the diagnosis.
-
To it, more than to anything else, I owe whatever success I have had - to this power of settling down to the day's work and trying to do it to the best of one's ability, and letting the future take care of itself.
-
At the outset do not be worried about this big question-Truth. It is a very simple matter if each one of you starts with the desire to get as much as possible. 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. In this unsatisfied quest the attitude of mind, the desire, the thirst-a thirst that from the soul must arise!-the fervent longing, are the be-all and the end-all.
-
To do today's work well and not to bother about tomorrow is the secret of accomplishment