William Osler Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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