William Osler - Art Quotes

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Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.

William Osler
While medicine is to be your vocation, or calling, see to it that you have also an avocation — some intellectual pastime which may serve to keep you in touch with the world of art, of science, or of letters.

William Osler
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.

William Osler
Acquire the art of detachment, the virtue of method, and the quality of thoroughness, but above all the grace of humility.

William Osler
Take the sum of human achievement in action, in science, in art, in literature—subtract the work of the men above forty, and while we should miss great treasures, even priceless treasures, we would practically be where we are today … The effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty.

William Osler
Faith is indeed one of the miracles of human nature which science is as ready to accept as it is to study its marvellous effects. When we realise what a vast asset it has been in history, the part which it has played in the healing art seems insignificant, and yet there is no department of knowledge more favourable to an impartial study of its effects, and this brings me to my subject — the faith that heals.

William Osler
Surrounded by people who demand certainty, — and not philosopher enough to agree with Locke that "Probability supplies the defect of our knowledge and guides us when that fails, and is always conversant about things of which we have no certainty," the practitioner too often gets into a habit of mind which resents the thought that opinion, not full knowledge, must be his stay and prop. There is no discredit, though there is at times much discomfort, in this everlasting perhaps with which we have to preface so much connected with the practice of our art. It is, as I said, inherent in the subject.

William Osler
The critical sense and sceptical attitude of the Hippocratic school laid the foundations of modern medicine on broad lines, and we owe to it: first, the emancipation of medicine from the shackles of priestcraft and of caste; secondly, the conception of medicine as an art based on accurate observation, and as a science, an integral part of the science of man and of nature; thirdly, the high moral ideals, expressed in that most "memorable of human documents" (Gomperz), the Hippocratic oath; and fourthly, the conception and realization of medicine as the profession of a cultivated gentleman.

William Osler
Use your five senses. The art of the practice of medicine is to be learned only by experience; 'tis not an inheritance; it... cannot be revealed. Learn to see, learn to hear, learn to feel, learn to smell, and know that by practice alone can you become expert.

William Osler
What, after all, is education but a subtle, slowly-affected change, due to the action upon us of the Externals; of the written record of the great minds of all ages, of the beautiful and harmonious surroundings of nature and of art, and of the lives, good or ill, of our fellows — these alone educate us, these alone mould the developing minds.

William Osler
The greatest art is in the concealment of art, and I may say that we of the medical profession excel in this respect.

William Osler
Errors in judgment must occur in the practice of an Art which consists largely in balancing probabilities.

William Osler