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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.

William Osler

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William Osler
Age: 70 †
Born: 1849
Born: July 12
Died: 1919
Died: December 29
Physician
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Sir William Osler
Sir William
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Ratios
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Medicine
Hesitate
Common
Doctors
Mixed
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A man is sane morally at thirty, rich mentally at forty, wise spiritually at fifty-or never!
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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 good physician treats the disease the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.
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Save the fleeting minute learn gracefully to dodge the bore.
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Care more for the individual patient than for the special features of the disease. . . . Put yourself in his place . . . The kindly word, the cheerful greeting, the sympathetic look - these the patient understands.
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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 are only two sorts of doctors those who practise with their brains, and those who practise with their tongues.
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The great minds, the great works transcend all limitations of time, of language, and of race, and the scholar can never feel initiated into the company of the elect until he can approach all of life's problems from the cosmopolitan standpoint.
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There is no disease more conducive to clinical humility than aneurysm of the aorta.
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It is much simpler to buy books than to read them and easier to read them than to absorb their contents.
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What is the student but a lover courting a fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp?
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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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Without faith a man can do nothing with it all things are possible.
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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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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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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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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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Perhaps no sin so easily besets us as a sense of self-satisfied superiority to others.
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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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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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