William Osler

“Listen to your patient, he is telling you the diagnosis.”

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

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

“Humanity has but three great enemies: fever, famine, and war; of these by far the greatest, by far the most terrible, is fever.”

“No man is really happy or safe without a hobby.”

“Soap and water and common sense are the best disinfectants.”

“The best book in the library is the patient himself.”

“To have striven, to have made an effort, to have been true to certain ideals – this alone is worth the struggle.”

“We are here to add what we can to, not to get what we can from, Life.”

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

“The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.”

“The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.”

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

“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.”

“The first duty of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.”

“The value of experience is not in seeing much, but in seeing wisely.”

“The master word is Work.”

“Observe, record, tabulate, communicate. Use your five senses. Learn to see, learn to hear, learn to feel, learn to smell, and know that by practice alone you can become expert.”