William Osler Quotes on Medicine & Medical (16 Quotes)

The young physician starts life with 20 drugs for each disease, and the old physician ends life with one drug for 20 diseases.

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.

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

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.

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.

The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.

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.

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.

Taking a lady's hand gives her confidence in her physician.

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

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.

It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.

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

He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all.

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.