Quotes from William Osler

There are three classes of human beings: men, women and women physicians.

It cannot be too often or too forcibly brought home to us that the hope of the profession is with the men who do its daily work in general practice.

Shed, as you do your garments, your daily sins, whether of omission or commission, and you will wake a free man, with a new life.

Soap and water and common sense are the best disinfectants.

Work is the open sesame of every portal, the great equalizer in the world, the true philosopher's stone which transmutes all the base metal of humanity into gold.

Now the way of life that I preach is a habit to be acquired gradually by long and steady repetition. It is the practice of living for the day only, and for the day's work.

The uselessness of men above sixty years of age and the incalculable benefit it would be in commercial, in political, and in professional life, if as a matter of course, men stopped work at this age.

Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought.

It is not as if our homeopathic brothers are asleep: far from it, they are awake - many of them at any rate - to the importance of the scientific study of disease.

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.

To do today's work well and not to bother about tomorrow is the secret of accomplishment

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

If it were not for the great variability among individuals, medicine might as well be a science, not an art.

What is the student but a lover courting a fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp?

The best preparation for tomorrow is to do today's work superbly well.

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

Advice is sought to confirm a position already taken.

Here's the advice Sir William Osler gave the students at Yale: Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day absorb all your interest, energy and enthusiasm. The best preparation for tomorrow is to live today superbly well.

Patients rarely die of the disease from which they suffer. Secondary or terminal infections are the real cause of death.

The great majority gave no signs one way or the other; like birth, their death was a sleep and a forgetting.

Things cannot always go your way. Learn to accept in silence the minor aggravations, cultivate the gift of taciturnity and consume your own smoke with an extra draught of hard work, so that those about you may not be annoyed with the dust and soot of your complaint.

Nature, the great Moloch, which exacts a frightful tax of human blood, sparing neither young nor old; taking the child from the cradle, the mother from her babe, and the father from the family.

Courage and cheerfulness will not only carry you over the rough places in life, but will enable you to bring comfort and help to the weak-hearted and will console you in the sad hours.