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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
Professor
Sir William Osler
Sir William
WO
Work
Public
Medical
Ratio
Education
Degree
Ratios
Audience
Medicine
Hesitate
Common
Doctors
Mixed
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Usually
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Inverse

More quotes by William Osler

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Advice is sought to confirm a position already taken.
William Osler
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Now the way of life that I preach is a habit to be acquired gradually by long and steady repetition. It is the practice of living for the day only, and for the day's work.
William Osler
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If it were not for the great variability among individuals, medicine might as well be a science, not an art.
William Osler
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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.
William Osler
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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.
William Osler
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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.'
William Osler
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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.
William Osler
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A well-trained, sensible doctor is one of the most valuable assets of a community.
William Osler
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It is not as if our homeopathic brothers are asleep: far from it, they are awake - many of them at any rate - to the importance of the scientific study of disease.
William Osler
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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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That man can interrogate as well as observe nature was a lesson slowly learned in his evolution.
William Osler
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The higher the standard of education in a profession, the less marked will be the charlatanism.
William Osler
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Patients should have rest, food, fresh air, and exercise - the quadrangle of health.
William Osler
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Save the fleeting minute learn gracefully to dodge the bore.
William Osler
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The only way to treat the common cold is with contempt.
William Osler
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He who knows syphilis knows medicine
William Osler
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Every patient you see is a lesson in much more than the malady from which he suffers.
William Osler
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What is the student but a lover courting a fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp?
William Osler
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Humanity has but three great enemies: fever, famine, and war of these by far the greatest, by far the most terrible, is fever.
William Osler
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The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.
William Osler