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William Osler Quotes
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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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The physician needs a clear head and a kind heart; his work is arduous and complex, requiring the exercise of the very highest faculties of the mind, while constantly appealing to the emotions and finer feelings.
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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Marriage is the natural end of the trained nurse. So truly as a young man married is a young man marred, is a woman unmarried, in a certain sense, a woman undone.
William Osler
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As it can be maintained that all the great advances have come from men under forty, so the history of the world shows that a very large proportion of the evils may be traced to the sexagenarians, nearly all the great mistakes politically and socially, all of the worst poems, most of the bad pictures, a majority of the bad novels and not a few of the bad sermons and speeches.
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
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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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The trained nurse as a factor in life may be regarded from many points of view - philanthropic, social, personal, professional and domestic. To her virtues we have been exceeding kind - tongues have dropped manna in their description. To her faults - well let us be blind...
William Osler
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The [medical] student often resembles the poet — he is born, not made.
William Osler
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The truth is the best you can get with your best endeavor, the best that the best men accept — with this you must learn to be satisfied, retaining at the same time with due humility an earnest desire for an ever larger portion.
William Osler
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Conservatism and old fogeyism are totally different things; the motto of one is "Prove all things and hold fast that which is good" and of the other "Prove nothing but hold fast that which is old."
William Osler
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The trained nurse is a modern representative, not of the Roman Vestal, but of the female guardian in Plato's republic - a choice selection from the very best women of the community who know the laws of health, and whose sympathies have been deepened by contact with the best and worst of men.
William Osler
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Common-sense nerve fibers are seldom medullated before forty — they are never seen even with a microscope before twenty.
William Osler
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From Hippocrates to Hunter, the treatment of disease was one long traffic in hypotheses.
William Osler
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Beware of words - they are dangerous things. They change color like the chameleon, and they return like a boomerang.
William Osler
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Civilization is but a filmy fringe on the history of man.
William Osler
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A well-trained, sensible doctor is one of the most valuable assets of a community.
William Osler
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As the practice of medicine is not a business and can never be one the education of the heart - the moral side of the man - must keep pace with the education of the head. Our fellow creatures cannot be dealt with as man deals in corn and coal; "the human heart by which we live" must control our professional relations.
William Osler
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Medicine, unlike law and theology, is a progressive science...
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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If necessary, be cruel; use the knife and the cautery to cure the intumescence and moral necrosis which you will feel in the posterior parietal region, in Gall and Spurzheim's center of self-esteem, where you will find a sore spot after you have made a mistake in diagnosis.
William Osler
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It cannot be denied that we have learned more rapidly how to prevent than how to cure diseases, but with a definite outline of our ignorance we no longer live now in a fool's Paradise, and fondly imagine that in all cases we control the issues of life and death with our pills and potions.
William Osler
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Learn to love the freedom of the student life, only too quickly to pass away; the absence of the coarser cares of after days, the joy in comradeship, the delight in new work, the happiness in knowing that you are making progress. Once only can you enjoy these pleasures.
William Osler
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Truth has been well called the daughter of Time, and even in anatomy, which is a science in a state of fact, the point of view changes with successive generations.
William Osler
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Too many men slip early out of the habit of studious reading, and yet that is essential.
William Osler
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Quote of the day
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
William Osler
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Born:
July 12, 1849
Died:
December 29, 1919
(aged 70)
Bio:
Sir William Osler, 1st Baronet was a Canadian physician and one of the four founding professors of Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Known for:
The Principles and Practice of Medicine (1892)
The quotable Osler
Counsels and ideals
Most used words:
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science
man
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study
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truth
twenty
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William Osler on Wikipedia
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