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
At the outset do not be worried about this big question-Truth. It is a very simple matter if each one of you starts with the desire to get as much as possible. No human being is constituted to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition. In this unsatisfied quest the attitude of mind, the desire, the thirst-a thirst that from the soul must arise!-the fervent longing, are the be-all and the end-all.
We doctors have always been a simple trusting folk. Did we not believe Galen implicitly for 1500 years and Hippocrates for more than 2000?
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.
When schemes are laid in advance, it is surprising how often the circumstances fit in with them
The first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.
The best preparation for tomorrow is to do today's work superbly well.
The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and to beget.
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.
Avoid wine and women -- choose a freckly-faced girl for a wife; they are invariably more amiable.
There are no straight backs, no symmetrical faces, many wry noses, and no even legs. We are a crooked and perverse generation.