William Osler - Disease Quotes

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To wrest from nature the secrets which have perplexed philosophers of all ages, to track to their sources the causes of disease, to correlate the vast stores of knowledge, that they may be quickly available for the prevention and cure of disease — these are our ambitions.

William Osler
The physician without physiology and chemistry flounders along in an aimless fashion, never able to gain any accurate conception of disease, practising a sort of popgun pharmacy, hitting now the malady and again the patient, he himself not knowing which.

William Osler
Observation plus thinking has given us the bodies of living creatures in health and disease. There have been two inherent difficulties — to get men to see straight and to get men to think clearly; but in spite of the frailty of the instrument, the method has been one of the most powerful ever placed in the hands of man.

William Osler
To have a group of cloistered clinicians away completely from the broad current of professional life would be bad for teacher and worse for student. The primary work of a professor of medicine in a medical school is in the wards, teaching his pupils how to deal with patients and their diseases.

William Osler
There is no disease more conducive to clinical humility than aneurysm of the aorta.

William Osler
To prevent disease, to relieve suffering and to heal the sick — this is our work.

William Osler
To investigate the causes of death, to examine carefully the condition of organs, after such changes have gone on in them as to render existence impossible and to apply such Knowledge to the prevention and treatment of disease, is one of the highest objects of the Physician.

William Osler
Every medical student should remember that his end is not to be a chemist, or a physiologist or an anatomist, but to learn how to recognize and treat disease, to become a practical physician.

William Osler
'Tis no idle challenge which we physicians throw out to the world when we claim that our mission is of the highest and of the noblest kind, not alone in curing disease but in educating the people in the laws of health, and in preventing the spread of plagues and pestilences...

William Osler
Medicine is learned by the bedside and not in the classroom. Let not your conceptions of the manifestations 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
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
From Hippocrates to Hunter, the treatment of disease was one long traffic in hypotheses.

William Osler
Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is today controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science.

William Osler
To study the phenomenon of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.

William Osler
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.

William Osler
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.

William Osler
The young physician starts life with twenty drugs for each disease, and the old physician ends life with one drug for twenty diseases.

William Osler