Words matter. These are the best William Osler Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.
Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought.
The best preparation for tomorrow is to do today’s work superbly well.
The value of experience is not in seeing much, but in seeing wisely.
One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.
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.
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 is no disease more conducive to clinical humility than aneurysm of the aorta.
The first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.
The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.
Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.
It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.
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 future is today.
The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.
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.
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.
No bubble is so iridescent or floats longer than that blown by the successful teacher.
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.
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.
