William Osler Quotes

The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.

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.

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!

Listen to your patient, he is telling you the diagnosis.

The person who takes medicine must recover twice, once from the disease and once from the medicine.

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.

It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.

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.

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.

No man is really happy or safe without a hobby.

He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all.

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.

The very first step towards success in any occupation is to become interested in it.

Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.

The trained nurse has become one of the great blessings of humanity, taking a place beside the physician and the priest.

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.

We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from life.

One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.

There are three classes of human beings: men, women and women physicians.

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.

The value of experience is not in seeing much, but in seeing wisely.

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.

To have a group of cloistered clinicians away completely from the broad current of professional life would be bad for teacher and worse for student. The primary work of a professor of medicine in a medical school is in the wards, teaching his pupils how to deal with patients and their diseases.

Every patient you see is a lesson in much more than the malady from which he suffers.

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.

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.

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.

The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.

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.

I desire no other epitaph - no hurry about it, I may say - than the statement that I taught medical students in the wards, as I regard this as by far the most useful and important work I have been called upon to do.

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.

Without faith a man can do nothing; with it all things are possible.

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.

Advice is sought to confirm a position already taken.

No bubble is so iridescent or floats longer than that blown by the successful teacher.

What is the student but a lover courting a fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp?

A physician who treats himself has a fool for a patient.

The only way to treat the common cold is with contempt.

Patients should have rest, food, fresh air, and exercise - the quadrangle of health.

Laughter is the music of life.

Too many men slip early out of the habit of studious reading, and yet that is essential.

Soap and water and common sense are the best disinfectants.