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To confess ignorance is often wiser than to beat about the bush with a hypothetical diagnosis.

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
Wiser
Bush
Beat
Beats
Ignorance
Often
Hypothetical
Diagnosis
Confess

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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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Jaundice is the disease that your friends diagnose.
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Laughter is the music of life.
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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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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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It cannot be too often or too forcibly brought home to us that the hope of the profession is with the men who do its daily work in general practice.
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Faith is a most precious commodity, without which we should be very badly off.
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The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.
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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.
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The Scots are the backbone of Canada. They are all right in their three vital parts - head, heart and haggis.
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It is strange how the memory of a man may float to posterity on what he would have himself regarded as the most trifling of his works.
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A well-trained, sensible doctor is one of the most valuable assets of a community.
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Happiness lies in the absorption in some vocation which satisfies the soul.
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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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Without egotism and full of feeling, laughter is the music of life.
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Shed, as you do your garments, your daily sins, whether of omission or commission, and you will wake a free man, with a new life.
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The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and beget.
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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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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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Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought.
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