William Osler Quotations

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

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

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

The best preparation for tomorrow is to do today's work superbly well.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Soap and water and common sense are the best disinfectants.

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

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.

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 greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.

The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.

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

One finger in the throat and one in the rectum makes a good diagnostician.

There are no straight backs, no symmetrical faces, many wry noses, and no even legs. We are a crooked and perverse generation.

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

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.

To die daily, after the manner of St. Paul, ensures the resurrection of a new man, who makes each day the epitome of life.

The search for static security - in the law and elsewhere - is misguided. The fact is security can only be achieved through constant change, adapting old ideas that have outlived their usefulness to current facts.

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

In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.

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

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

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.

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.

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!

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Advice is sought to confirm a position already taken.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Jaundice is the disease that your friends diagnose.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

The librarian of today, and it will be true still more of the librarians of tomorrow, are not fiery dragons interposed between the people and the books. They are useful public servants, who manage libraries in the interest of the public . . . Many still think that a great reader, or a writer of books, will make an excellent librarian. This is pure fallacy.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

He who knows syphilis knows medicine

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.

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.

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.

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.

At the outset do not be worried about this big question-Truth. It is a very simple matter if each one of you starts with the desire to get as much as possible. 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. In this unsatisfied quest the attitude of mind, the desire, the thirst-a thirst that from the soul must arise!-the fervent longing, are the be-all and the end-all.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The Scots are the backbone of Canada. They are all right in their three vital parts - head, heart and haggis.