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

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
Medicine
Science
Art
Probability
Uncertainty
Medical

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Happiness lies in the absorption in some vocation which satisfies the soul.
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Now of the difficulties bound up with the public in which we doctors work, I hesitate to speak in a mixed audience. Common sense in matters medical is rare, and is usually in inverse ratio to the degree of education.
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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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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.
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A library represents the mind of its collector, fancies and foibles, strengths and weaknesses, prejudices and preferences.
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Taking a lady's hand gives her confidence in her physician.
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To confess ignorance is often wiser than to beat about the bush with a hypothetical diagnosis.
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A physician who treats himself has a fool for a patient.
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Listen to your patient, he is telling you the diagnosis.
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There is no disease more conducive to clinical humility than aneurysm of the aorta.
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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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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.
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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.'
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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.
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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.
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We are all dietetic sinners only a small percent of what we eat nourishes us the balance goes to waste and loss of energy.
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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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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.
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.
William Osler
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Too many men slip early out of the habit of studious reading, and yet that is essential.
William Osler