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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
Folk
Doctors
Folks
Simple
Believe
Hippocrates
Years
Galen
Always
Implicitly
Trusting

More quotes by William Osler

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Things cannot always go your way. Learn to accept in silence the minor aggravations, cultivate the gift of taciturnity and consume your own smoke with an extra draught of hard work, so that those about you may not be annoyed with the dust and soot of your complaints.
William Osler
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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.
William Osler
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Throw away all ambition beyond that of doing the day's work well. The travelers on the road to success live in the present, heedless of taking thought for the morrow. Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your wildest ambition.
William Osler
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Perhaps no sin so easily besets us as a sense of self-satisfied superiority to others.
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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The hardest conviction to get into the mind of a beginner is that the education upon which he is engaged is not a college course, not a medical course, but a life course, for which the work of a few years under teachers is but a preparation.
William Osler
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Work is the open sesame of every portal, the great equalizer in the world, the true philosopher's stone which transmutes all the base metal of humanity into gold.
William Osler
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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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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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Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.
William Osler
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The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and beget.
William Osler
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Few diseases present greater difficulties in the way of diagnosis than malignant endocarditis, difficulties which in many cases are practi- cally insurmountable. It is no disparagement to the many skilled physicians who have put their cases upon record to say that, in fully one-half the diagnosis was made post mortem.
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 good physician treats the disease the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.
William Osler
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The extraordinary development of modern science may be her undoing. Specialism, now a necessity, has fragmented the specialities themselves in a way that makes the outlook hazardous. The workers lose all sense of proportion in a maze of minutiae.
William Osler
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No bubble is so iridescent or floats longer than that blown by the successful teacher.
William Osler
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No man is really happy or safe without a hobby.
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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Save the fleeting minute learn gracefully to dodge the bore.
William Osler
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No dreams, no visions, no delicious fantasies, no castles in the air, with which, as the old song so truly says, hearts are broken, heads are turned.
William Osler