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The practice of medicine is an art, not a trade a calling, not a business a calling in which your heart will be exercised equally with your head.

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
Calling
Trade
Head
Practice
Business
Exercised
Art
Equally
Heart
Medical
Medicine

More quotes by William Osler

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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?
William Osler
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What is patience but an equanimity which enables you to rise superior to the trials of life.
William Osler
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Patients rarely die of the disease from which they suffer. Secondary or terminal infections are the real cause of death.
William Osler
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In seeking absolute truth we aim at the unattainable and must be content with broken portions.
William Osler
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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.
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 very first step toward success in any occupation is to become interested in it. Locke put this in a very happy way when he said, give a pupil a relish of knowledge and you put life into his 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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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.
William Osler
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Soap and water and common sense are the best disinfectants.
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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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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No man is really happy or safe without a hobby.
William Osler
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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.
William Osler
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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.
William Osler
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Avoid wine and women - choose a freckly-faced girl for a wife they are invariably more amiable.
William Osler
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Be calm and strong and patient. Meet failure and disappointment with courage. Rise superior to the trials of life, and never give in to hopelessness or despair. In danger, in adversity, cling to your principles and ideals. Aequanimitas!
William Osler
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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.
William Osler
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Fed on the dry husks of facts, the human heart has a hidden want which science cannot supply.
William Osler
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It is not... That some people do not know what to do with truth when it is offered to them, But the tragic fate is to reach, after patient search, a condition of mind-blindness, in which. The truth is not recognized, though it stares you in the face.
William Osler