William Osler
Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.Collection: Science
The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.Collection: Good
The value of experience is not in seeing much, but in seeing wisely.Collection: Experience
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.Collection: Alone
The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.Collection: Wisdom
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.Collection: Truth
Soap and water and common sense are the best disinfectants.Collection: Best
The best preparation for tomorrow is to do today's work superbly well.Collection: Work
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.Collection: Age
The future is today.Collection: Future
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.Collection: Art
We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from life.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Medical
It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.Collection: Medical
To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals - this alone is worth the struggle.Collection: Alone
No bubble is so iridescent or floats longer than that blown by the successful teacher.Collection: Teacher
He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all.
One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.
The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.
There is no disease more conducive to clinical humility than aneurysm of the aorta.
The young physician starts life with 20 drugs for each disease, and the old physician ends life with one drug for 20 diseases.
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.
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.
In seeking absolute truth we aim at the unattainable and must be content with broken portions.
The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and to beget.
The first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.
It is much simpler to buy books than to read them and easier to read them than to absorb their contents.
The very first step towards success in any occupation is to become interested in it.
What is the student but a lover courting a fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp?
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.
Listen to your patient, he is telling you the diagnosis.Collection: Diagnosis
The person who takes medicine must recover twice, once from the disease and once from the medicine.Collection: Health
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 isCollection: Errors
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.Collection: Wise
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!Collection: Life
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.Collection: Special
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.Collection: Past
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.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Teacher
If it were not for the great variability among individuals, medicine might as well be a science, not an art.Collection: Art
There are three classes of human beings: men, women and women physicians.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Jobs
Acquire the art of detachment, the virtue of method, and the quality of thoroughness, but above all the grace of humility.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Memories
The Scots are the backbone of Canada. They are all right in their three vital parts - head, heart and haggis.Collection: Heart
In the Mortality Bills, pneumonia is an easy second, to tuberculosis; indeed in many cities the death-rate is now higher and it has become, to use the phrase of Bunyan 'the captain of the men of death.'Collection: Science
Take the sum of human achievement in action, in science, in art, in literature subtract the work of the men above forty, and while we should miss great treasures, even priceless treasures, we would practically be where we are today ... The effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty.Collection: Art
There is no more potent antidote to the corroding influence of mammon than the presence in the community of a body of men devoted to science, living for investigation and caring nothing for the lust of the eyes and the pride of life.Collection: Life