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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
Exercised
Business
Equally
Art
Medical
Heart
Medicine

More quotes by William Osler

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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.
William Osler
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To have a group of cloistered clinicians away completely from the broad current of professional life would be bad for teacher and worse for student. The primary work of a professor of medicine in a medical school is in the wards, teaching his pupils how to deal with patients and their diseases.
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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The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.
William Osler
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A library represents the mind of its collector, fancies and foibles, strengths and weaknesses, prejudices and preferences.
William Osler
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There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language.
William Osler
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The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.
William Osler
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By far the most dangerous foe we have to fight is apathy-indifference from whatever cause, not from a lack of knowledge, but from carelessness, from absorption in other pursuits, from a contempt bred of self satisfaction.
William Osler
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The successful teacher is no longer on a height, pumping knowledge at high pressure into passive receptacles.
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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We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from life.
William Osler
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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.
William Osler
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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.
William Osler
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I desire no other epitaph - no hurry about it, I may say - than the statement that I taught medical students in the wards, as I regard this as by far the most useful and important work I have been called upon to do.
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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A well-trained, sensible doctor is one of the most valuable assets of a community.
William Osler
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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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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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The clean tongue, the clear head, and the bright eye are birthrights of each day.
William Osler
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Laughter is the music of life.
William Osler