William osler quotes

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

We are constantly misled by the ease with which our minds fall into the ruts of one or two experiences

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

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

The uselessness of men above sixty years of age and the incalculable benefit it would be in commercial, in political, and in professional life, if as a matter of course, men stopped work at this age.

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.

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

It is not the delicate neurotic person who is prone to angina, but the robust, the vigorous in mind and body, the keen and ambitious man, the indicator of whose engines is always at full speed ahead.

There is a form of laughter that springs from the heart, heard every day in the merry voice of childhood, the expression of a laughter - loving spirit that defies analysis by the philosopher, which has nothing rigid or mechanical in it, and totally without social significance. Bubbling spontaneously from the heart of child or man. Without egotism and full of feeling, laughter is the music of life.

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.

We doctors have always been a simple trusting folk. Did we not believe Galen implicitly for 1500 years and Hippocrates for more than 2000?

The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.

Happiness lies in the absorption in some vocation which satisfies the soul.

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.

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.

Let each hour of the day have its allotted duty, and cultivate that power of concentration which grows with its exercise.

The great minds, the great works transcend all limitations of time, of language, and of race, and the scholar can never feel initiated into the company of the elect until he can approach all of life's problems from the cosmopolitan standpoint.

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

Nothing is life is more wonderful than faith.

Faith is a most precious commodity, without which we should be very badly off.

Varicose veins are the result of an improper selection of grandparents.

By far the most dangerous foe we have to fight is apathy-indifference from whatever cause, not from a lack of knowledge, but from carelessness, from absorption in other pursuits, from a contempt bred of self satisfaction.

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.

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 only way to treat the common cold is with contempt.

It is much simpler to buy books than to read them and easier to read them than to absorb their contents.

Perhaps no sin so easily besets us as a sense of self-satisfied superiority to others.

The higher education so much needed today is not given in the school, is not to be bought in the market place, but it has to be wrought out in each one of us for himself; it is the silent influence of character on character.

The clean tongue, the clear head, and the bright eye are birthrights of each day.

The extraordinary development of modern science may be her undoing. Specialism, now a necessity, has fragmented the specialities themselves in a way that makes the outlook hazardous. The workers lose all sense of proportion in a maze of minutiae.

Without egotism and full of feeling, laughter is the music of life.

Half of us are blind, few of us feel, and we are all deaf.

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 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.

Jaundice is the disease that your friends diagnose.

For the general practitioner a well-used library is one of the few correctives of the premature senility which is so apt to take him.

Humanity has but three great enemies: fever, famine, and war; of these by far the greatest, by far the most terrible, is fever.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

Nature, the great Moloch, which exacts a frightful tax of human blood, sparing neither young nor old; taking the child from the cradle, the mother from her babe, and the father from the family.

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 physician starts life with 20 drugs for each disease, and the old physician ends life with one drug for 20 diseases.

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

To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals - this alone is worth the struggle.

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

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

But whatever you do, take neither yourselves nor your fellow-creatures too seriously. There is tragedy enough in our daily routine, but there is room too for a keen sense of the absurdities and incongruities of life, and in the shifting panorama no one sees better than the doctor the perennial sameness of men’s ways.

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

A man is sane morally at thirty, rich mentally at forty, wise spiritually at fifty-or never!

The young doctor should look about early for an avocation, a pastime, that will take him away from patients, pills, and potions.

In seeking absolute truth we aim at the unattainable and must be content with broken portions.

Fed on the dry husks of facts, the human heart has a hidden want which science cannot supply.

There are only two sorts of doctors; those who practise with their brains, and those who practise with their tongues.

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.

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.

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.

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

There is no disease more conducive to clinical humility than aneurysm of the aorta.

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.

Taking a lady's hand gives her confidence in her physician.

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.

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 great majority gave no signs one way or the other; like birth, their death was a sleep and a forgetting.

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

No man is really happy or safe without a hobby.

A well-trained, sensible doctor is one of the most valuable assets of a community.

To do today's work well and not to bother about tomorrow is the secret of accomplishment

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

Courage and cheerfulness will not only carry you over the rough places in life, but will enable you to bring comfort and help to the weak-hearted and will console you in the sad hours.

Start at once a bedside library and spend the last half hour of the day in communion with the saints of humanity.

Laughter is the music of life.

Even in populous districts, the practice of medicine is a lonely road which winds up-hill all the way and a man may easily go astray and never reach the Delectable Mountains unless he early finds those shepherd guides of whom Bunyan tells, Knowledge, Experience, Watchful, and Sincere.

Breathes there a man with soul so dead that it does not glow at the thought of what the men of his blood have done and suffered to make his country what it is? There is room, plenty of room, for proper pride of land and birth. What I inveigh against is a cursed spirit of intolerance, conceived in distrust and bred in ignorance, that makes the mental attitude perennially antagonistic, even bitterly antagonistic, to everything foreign, that subordinates everywhere the race to the nation, forgetting the higher claims of human brotherhood.

The successful teacher is no longer on a height, pumping knowledge at high pressure into passive receptacles.

Conservatism and old fogeyism are totally different things; the motto of one is "Prove all things and hold fast that which is good" and of the other "Prove nothing but hold fast that which is old."

That man can interrogate as well as observe nature was a lesson slowly learned in his evolution.

Now the way of life that I preach is a habit to be acquired gradually by long and steady repetition. It is the practice of living for the day only, and for the day's work.

Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought.

The higher the standard of education in a profession, the less marked will be the charlatanism.

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

To confess ignorance is often wiser than to beat about the bush with a hypothetical diagnosis.

Avoid wine and women - choose a freckly-faced girl for a wife; they are invariably more amiable.

Shut out all of your past except that which will help you weather your tomorrows.

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.

He who knows syphilis knows medicine

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.

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.

Advice is sought to confirm a position already taken.

Now of the difficulties bound up with the public in which we doctors work, I hesitate to speak in a mixed audience. Common sense in matters medical is rare, and is usually in inverse ratio to the degree of education.

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.

The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and beget.

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

The very first step toward success in any occupation is to become interested in it. Locke put this in a very happy way when he said, give a pupil "a relish of knowledge" and you put life into his work.

To know just what has do be done, then to do it, comprises the whole philosophy of practical life.

Acquire the art of detachment, the virtue of method, and the quality of thoroughness, but above all the grace of humility.

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

Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition.

It cannot be too often or too forcibly brought home to us that the hope of the profession is with the men who do its daily work in general practice.

Personally, I do not see in Canada it would be a feasible thing if any Ministry organized taking over both the Health and the Disease of the entire community... even in the most favourable circumstances... there would be that absence of competition and that sense of independence... I do not believe it would be good for the profession or good for the Public.

Engrossed late and soon in professional cares, getting and spending, you may may so lay waste your powers that you may find, too late, with hearts given away, that t here is no place in your habit-stricken souls for those gentler influences which make your life worth living.

Beware of people who call you 'Doc.' They rarely pay their bills.

As it can be maintained that all the great advances have come from men under forty, so the history of the world shows that a very large proportion of the evils may be traced to the sexagenarians, nearly all the great mistakes politically and socially, all of the worst poems, most of the bad pictures, a majority of the bad novels and not a few of the bad sermons and speeches.

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.

Patients rarely die of the disease from which they suffer. Secondary or terminal infections are the real cause of death.

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!

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

Soap and water and common sense are the best disinfectants.

Few diseases present greater difficulties in the way of diagnosis than malignant endocarditis, difficulties which in many cases are practi- cally insurmountable. It is no disparagement to the many skilled physicians who have put their cases upon record to say that, in fully one-half the diagnosis was made post mortem.

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 most essential thing for happiness is the gift of friendship.

We are all dietetic sinners; only a small percent of what we eat nourishes us; the balance goes to waste and loss of energy.

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

When schemes are laid in advance, it is surprising how often the circumstances will fit in with them.

The true poetry of life: the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary man, of the plain, toil-worn woman, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and their griefs.

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.

Throw away all ambition beyond that of doing the day's work well. The travelers on the road to success live in the present, heedless of taking thought for the morrow. Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your wildest ambition.

What is patience but an equanimity which enables you to rise superior to the trials of life.

If it were not for the great variability among individuals, medicine might as well be a science, not an art.