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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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William Osler
Age: 70 †
Born: 1849
Born: July 12
Died: 1919
Died: December 29
Physician
Professor
Sir William Osler
Sir William
WO
Always
Implicitly
Trusting
Folk
Doctors
Folks
Simple
Believe
Hippocrates
Years
Galen

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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.
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Courage and cheerfulness will not only carry you over the rough places in life, but will enable you to bring comfort and help to the weak-hearted and will console you in the sad hours.
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It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.
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One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.
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Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought.
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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.
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The clean tongue, the clear head, and the bright eye are birthrights of each day.
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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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Gentlemen, I have a confession to make. Half of what we have taught you is in error, and furthermore we cannot tell you which half it is
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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.
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There is no disease more conducive to clinical humility than aneurysm of the aorta.
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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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Shut out all of your past except that which will help you weather your tomorrows.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Soap and water and common sense are the best disinfectants.
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The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.
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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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