William Osler
William Osler
Sir William Osler, 1st Baronet, FRS, FRCPwas a Canadian physician and one of the four founding professors of Johns Hopkins Hospital. Osler created the first residency program for specialty training of physicians, and he was the first to bring medical students out of the lecture hall for bedside clinical training. He has frequently been described as the "Father of Modern Medicine". Osler was a person of many interests, who in addition to being a physician, was a bibliophile, historian, author,...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionDoctor
Date of Birth12 July 1849
CountryCanada
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.
Few diseases present greater difficulties in the way of diagnosis than malignant endocarditis, difficulties which in many cases are practi- cally insurmountable. It is no disparagement to the many skilled physicians who have put their cases upon record to say that, in fully one-half the diagnosis was made post mortem.
Jaundice is the disease that your friends diagnose.
The young physician starts life with 20 drugs for each disease, and the old physician ends life with one drug for 20 diseases.
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.
There is no disease more conducive to clinical humility than aneurysm of the aorta.
Patients rarely die of the disease from which they suffer. Secondary or terminal infections are the real cause of death.
The person who takes medicine must recover twice, once from the disease and once from the medicine.
The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.
The search for static security - in the law and elsewhere - is misguided. The fact is security can only be achieved through constant change, adapting old ideas that have outlived their usefulness to current facts.
To know what has to be done, then do it, comprises the whole philosophy of practical life.
One finger in the throat and one in the rectum makes a good diagnostician.
To it, more than to anything else, I owe whatever success I have had -- to this power of settling down to the day's work and trying to do it to the best of one's ability, and letting the future take care of itself.
To die daily, after the manner of St. Paul, ensures the resurrection of a new man, who makes each day the epitome of life.