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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.

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
Life
Disease
Diseased
Conditions
Abnormal
Health
React
Law
Alike
Faces
Behave
Individual
Bodies
Two
Individuals
Body
Medicine
Variability

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The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.
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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.
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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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Laughter is the music of life.
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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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Acquire the art of detachment, the virtue of method, and the quality of thoroughness, but above all the grace of humility.
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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
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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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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.
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Save the fleeting minute learn gracefully to dodge the bore.
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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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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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It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.
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Let each hour of the day have its allotted duty, and cultivate that power of concentration which grows with its exercise.
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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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Listen to your patient, he is telling you the diagnosis.
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Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought.
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Advice is sought to confirm a position already taken.
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Patients rarely die of the disease from which they suffer. Secondary or terminal infections are the real cause of death.
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Fed on the dry husks of facts, the human heart has a hidden want which science cannot supply.
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