William Osler - Medicine Quotes

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One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.

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

William Osler
Even in populous districts, the practice of medicine is a lonely road which winds up-hill all the way and a man may easily go astray and never reach the Delectable Mountains unless he early finds those shepherd guides of whom Bunyan tells, Knowledge, Experience, Watchful, and Sincere.

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
It must be confessed that the practice of medicine among our fellow creatures is often a testy and choleric business.

William Osler
I am firmly convinced that the best book in medicine is the book of Nature, as written large in the bodies of men.

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
Medicine, unlike law and theology, is a progressive science...

William Osler
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
A desire to take medicine is, perhaps, the great feature which distinguishes man from other animals.

William Osler
The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.

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 helps a man immensely to be a bit of a hero-worshipper, and the stories of the lives of the masters of medicine do much to stimulate our ambition and rouse our sympathies.

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
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
There seems to be no limit to the possibilities of scientific medicine, and while philanthropists are turning to it as to the hope of humanity, philosophers see, as in some far-off vision, a science from which may come in the prophetic words of the Son of Sirach, "Peace over all the earth."

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