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

William Osler

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William Osler
Age: 70 †
Born: 1849
Born: July 12
Died: 1919
Died: December 29
Physician
Professor
Sir William Osler
Sir William
WO
Health
Sort
Important
Much
Diseased
Medical
Medicine
Patient
Disease

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The person who takes medicine must recover twice, once from the disease and once from the medicine.
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Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought.
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If it were not for the great variability among individuals, medicine might as well be a science, not an art.
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The trained nurse has become one of the great blessings of humanity, taking a place beside the physician and the priest.
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There is no disease more conducive to clinical humility than aneurysm of the aorta.
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The great majority gave no signs one way or the other like birth, their death was a sleep and a forgetting.
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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.
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The young doctor should look about early for an avocation, a pastime, that will take him away from patients, pills, and potions.
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The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.
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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.
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That man can interrogate as well as observe nature was a lesson slowly learned in his evolution.
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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.
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The young physician starts life with 20 drugs for each disease, and the old physician ends life with one drug for 20 diseases.
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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.
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Without faith a man can do nothing with it all things are possible.
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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.
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Happiness lies in the absorption in some vocation which satisfies the soul.
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We doctors have always been a simple trusting folk. Did we not believe Galen implicitly for 1500 years and Hippocrates for more than 2000?
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Start at once a bedside library and spend the last half hour of the day in communion with the saints of humanity.
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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
William Osler