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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.

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
Starts
Drug
Disease
Ends
Young
Physician
Life
Diseases
Physicians
Drugs

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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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Shut out all of your past except that which will help you weather your tomorrows.
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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.
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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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We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from life.
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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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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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He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all.
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Happiness lies in the absorption in some vocation which satisfies the soul.
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The very first step towards success in any occupation is to become interested in it.
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We are constantly misled by the ease with which our minds fall into the ruts of one or two experiences
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A physician who treats himself has a fool for a patient.
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Conservatism and old fogeyism are totally different things the motto of one is Prove all things and hold fast that which is good and of the other Prove nothing but hold fast that which is old.
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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.
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Soap and water and common sense are the best disinfectants.
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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.
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Jaundice is the disease that your friends diagnose.
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Even in populous districts, the practice of medicine is a lonely road which winds up-hill all the way and a man may easily go astray and never reach the Delectable Mountains unless he early finds those shepherd guides of whom Bunyan tells, Knowledge, Experience, Watchful, and Sincere.
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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.
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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.
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