Welcome to our collection of quotes by William Osler
Wikipedia Summary for William Osler
Sir William Osler, 1st Baronet, (July 12, 1849 – December 29, 1919) was a Canadian physician and one of the four founding professors of Johns Hopkins Hospital. Osler created the first residency program for specialty training of physicians, and he was the first to bring medical students out of the lecture hall for bedside clinical training. He has frequently been described as the Father of Modern Medicine and one of the "greatest diagnosticians ever to wield a stethoscope". Osler was a person of many interests, who in addition to being a physician, was a bibliophile, historian, author, and renowned practical joker. One of his achievements was the founding of the History of Medicine Society (formally "section"), at the Royal Society of Medicine, London.
The future is today.
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.
To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals -- this alone is worth the struggle.
Nature, the great Moloch, which exacts a frightful tax of human blood, sparing neither young nor old; taking the child from the cradle, the mother from her babe, and the father from the family.
To do today's work well and not to bother about tomorrow is the secret of accomplishment.
Faith is a most precious commodity, without which we should be very badly off.
Half of us are blind, few of us feel, and we are all deaf.
To confess ignorance is often wiser than to beat about the bush with a hypothetical diagnosis.
Listen to your patient, he is telling you the diagnosis.
Fed on the dry husks of facts, the human heart has a hidden want which science cannot supply.
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.
Humanity has but three great enemies: fever, famine, and war; of these by far the greatest, by far the most terrible, is fever.
Save the fleeting minute; learn gracefully to dodge the bore.
A man is sane morally at thirty, rich mentally at forty, wise spiritually at fifty-or never!
The great minds, the great works transcend all limitations of time, of language, and of race, and the scholar can never feel initiated into the company of the elect until he can approach all of life's problems from the cosmopolitan standpoint.
Every patient you see is a lesson in much more than the malady from which he suffers.
Taking a lady's hand gives her confidence in her physician.
A physician who treats himself has a fool for a patient.
When schemes are laid in advance, it is surprising how often the circumstances will fit in with them.
There are only two sorts of doctors; those who practise with their brains, and those who practise with their tongues.
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.
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.
A well-trained, sensible doctor is one of the most valuable assets of a community.
There are, in truth, no specialties in medicine, since to know fully many of the most important diseases a man must be familiar with their manifestations in many organs.
Patients rarely die of the disease from which they suffer. Secondary or terminal infections are the real cause of death.
He who knows syphilis knows medicine.
The future belongs to Science. More and more she will control the destinies of the nations. Already she has them in her crucible and on her balances.
What is patience but an equanimity which enables you to rise superior to the trials of life.
Happiness lies in the absorption in some vocation which satisfies the soul.
Advice is sought to confirm a position already taken.
There are three classes of human beings: men, women and women physicians.
The clean tongue, the clear head, and the bright eye are birthrights of each day.
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.
The only way to treat the common cold is with contempt.
We doctors have always been a simple trusting folk. Did we not believe Galen implicitly for 1500 years and Hippocrates for more than 2000?
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.
Jaundice is the disease that your friends diagnose.
It is not the delicate neurotic person who is prone to angina, but the robust, the vigorous in mind and body, the keen and ambitious man, the indicator of whose engines is always at full speed ahead.
The successful teacher is no longer on a height, pumping knowledge at high pressure into passive receptacles.
To know just what has do be done, then to do it, comprises the whole philosophy of practical life.
In the Mortality Bills, pneumonia is an easy second, to tuberculosis; indeed in many cities the death-rate is now higher and it has become, to use the phrase of Bunyan 'the captain of the men of death.'
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.
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.
Longer Version:
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. Often the best part of your work will have nothing to do with potions and powders, but with the exercise of an influence of the strong upon the weak, of the righteous upon the wicked, of the wise upon the foolish.
No man is really happy or safe without a hobby.
The Scots are the backbone of Canada. They are all right in their three vital parts -- head, heart and haggis.
Perhaps no sin so easily besets us as a sense of self-satisfied superiority to others.
A library represents the mind of its collector, fancies and foibles, strengths and weaknesses, prejudices and preferences.
Longer Version:
A library represents the mind of its collector, his fancies and foibles, his strength and weakness, his prejudices and preferences. Particularly is this the case if, to the character of a collector, he adds -- or tries to add -- the qualities of a student who wishes to know the books and the lives of the men who wrote them. The friendships of his life, the phases of his growth, the vagaries of his mind, all are represented.
It is not... That some people do not know what to do with truth when it is offered to them, But the tragic fate is to reach, after patient search, a condition of mind-blindness, in which. The truth is not recognized, though it stares you in the face.
Avoid wine and women -- choose a freckly-faced girl for a wife; they are invariably more amiable.
The higher education so much needed today is not given in the school, is not to be bought in the market place, but it has to be wrought out in each one of us for himself; it is the silent influence of character on character.
Start at once a bedside library and spend the last half hour of the day in communion with the saints of humanity.
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.
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.
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.
The young doctor should look about early for an avocation, a pastime, that will take him away from patients, pills, and potions.
The true poetry of life: the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary man, of the plain, toil-worn woman, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and their griefs.
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.
Shed, as you do your garments, your daily sins, whether of omission or commission, and you will wake a free man, with a new life.
The uselessness of men above sixty years of age and the incalculable benefit it would be in commercial, in political, and in professional life, if as a matter of course, men stopped work at this age.
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.
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.
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.
We are constantly misled by the ease with which our minds fall into the ruts of one or two experiences.
Acquire the art of detachment, the virtue of method, and the quality of thoroughness, but above all the grace of humility.
Too many men slip early out of the habit of studious reading, and yet that is essential.
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.
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.
If it were not for the great variability among individuals, medicine might as well be a science, not an art.
Be calm and strong and patient. Meet failure and disappointment with courage. Rise superior to the trials of life, and never give in to hopelessness or despair. In danger, in adversity, cling to your principles and ideals. Aequanimitas!
Without egotism and full of feeling, laughter is the music of life.
Laughter is the music of life.
Patients should have rest, food, fresh air, and exercise -- the quadrangle of health.
Varicose veins are the result of an improper selection of grandparents.
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.
One special advantage of the skeptical attitude of mind is that a man is never vexed to find that after all he has been in the wrong.
The trained nurse has become one of the great blessings of humanity, taking a place beside the physician and the priest.
Without faith a man can do nothing; with it all things are possible.
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.
The person who takes medicine must recover twice, once from the disease and once from the medicine.
The secret of successful working lies in the systemic arrangement of what you have to do. I know of no better way to accomplish a large amount of work.
The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.
The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and to beget.
To study the phenomena of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.
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.
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.
The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.
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.
What is the student but a lover courting a fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp?
It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.
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.