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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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William Osler
Age: 70 †
Born: 1849
Born: July 12
Died: 1919
Died: December 29
Physician
Professor
Sir William Osler
Sir William
WO
Great
Medicine
Among
Individual
Science
Art
Wells
Might
Variability
Well
Individuals

More quotes by William Osler

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A physician who treats himself has a fool for a patient.
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.
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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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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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Beware of people who call you 'Doc.' They rarely pay their bills.
William Osler
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What is the student but a lover courting a fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp?
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.
William Osler
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The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.
William Osler
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Listen to your patient, he is telling you the diagnosis.
William Osler
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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.
William Osler
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The person who takes medicine must recover twice, once from the disease and once from the medicine.
William Osler
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That man can interrogate as well as observe nature was a lesson slowly learned in his evolution.
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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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.
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
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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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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.
William Osler
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Care more for the individual patient than for the special features of the disease. . . . Put yourself in his place . . . The kindly word, the cheerful greeting, the sympathetic look - these the patient understands.
William Osler
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Start at once a bedside library and spend the last half hour of the day in communion with the saints of humanity.
William Osler