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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
Believe
Hippocrates
Years
Galen
Always
Implicitly
Trusting
Folk
Doctors
Folks
Simple

More quotes by William Osler

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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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Now the way of life that I preach is a habit to be acquired gradually by long and steady repetition. It is the practice of living for the day only, and for the day's work.
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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.
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To confess ignorance is often wiser than to beat about the bush with a hypothetical diagnosis.
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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.
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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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There is no more potent antidote to the corroding influence of mammon than the presence in the community of a body of men devoted to science, living for investigation and caring nothing for the lust of the eyes and the pride of life.
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Patients should have rest, food, fresh air, and exercise - the quadrangle of health.
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No man is really happy or safe without a hobby.
William Osler
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Advice is sought to confirm a position already taken.
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Listen to your patient, he is telling you the diagnosis.
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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.
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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.
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We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from life.
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A man is sane morally at thirty, rich mentally at forty, wise spiritually at fifty-or never!
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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The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.
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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The good physician treats the disease the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.
William Osler
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The teacher's life should have three periods, study until twenty-five, investigation until forty, profession until sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance.
William Osler