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

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
Patient
Uncharted
Sea
Sails
Study
Patients
Books
Sailing
Doe
Studies
Book
Sail
Without
Medical
Medicine

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Listen to your patient, he is telling you the diagnosis.
William Osler
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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.
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One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.
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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.
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What is the student but a lover courting a fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp?
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There are only two sorts of doctors those who practise with their brains, and those who practise with their tongues.
William Osler
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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.
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The true poetry of life: the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary man, of the plain, toil-worn woman, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and their griefs.
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Engrossed late and soon in professional cares, getting and spending, you may may so lay waste your powers that you may find, too late, with hearts given away, that t here is no place in your habit-stricken souls for those gentler influences which make your life worth living.
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Avoid wine and women - choose a freckly-faced girl for a wife they are invariably more amiable.
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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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A physician who treats himself has a fool for a patient.
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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.
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The higher the standard of education in a profession, the less marked will be the charlatanism.
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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.
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Shed, as you do your garments, your daily sins, whether of omission or commission, and you will wake a free man, with a new life.
William Osler
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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.
William Osler
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The future belongs to Science. More and more she will control the destinies of the nations. Already she has them in her crucible and on her balances.
William Osler
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One special advantage of the skeptical attitude of mind is that a man is never vexed to find that after all he has been in the wrong.
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The clean tongue, the clear head, and the bright eye are birthrights of each day.
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