William Osler Medicine Quotations

Even in populous districts, the practice of medicine is a lonely road which winds up-hill all the way and a man may easily go astray and never reach the Delectable Mountains unless he early finds those shepherd guides of whom Bunyan tells, Knowledge, Experience, Watchful, and Sincere.

The only way to treat the common cold is with contempt.

He who knows syphilis knows medicine

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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 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.