Quotes from William Osler

The first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.

The true poetry of life: the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary man, of the plain, toil-worn woman, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and their griefs.

It is not the delicate neurotic person who is prone to angina, but the robust, the vigorous in mind and body, the keen and ambitious man, the indicator of whose engines is always at full speed ahead.

That man can interrogate as well as observe nature was a lesson slowly learned in his evolution.

A man is sane morally at thirty, rich mentally at forty, wise spiritually at fifty-or never!

What is patience but an equanimity which enables you to rise superior to the trials of life.

Nothing will sustain you more potently than the power to recognize in your humdrum routine, as perhaps it may be thought, the true poetry of life.

The most essential thing for happiness is the gift of friendship.

Happiness lies in the absorption in some vocation which satisfies the soul.

The person who takes medicine must recover twice, once from the disease and once from the medicine.

Patients should have rest, food, fresh air, and exercise - the quadrangle of health.

A well-trained, sensible doctor is one of the most valuable assets of a community.

The trained nurse has become one of the great blessings of humanity, taking a place beside the physician and the priest.

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

Start at once a bedside library and spend the last half hour of the day in communion with the saints of humanity.

We are all dietetic sinners; only a small percent of what we eat nourishes us; the balance goes to waste and loss of energy.

Care more for the individual patient than for the special features of the disease. . . . Put yourself in his place . . . The kindly word, the cheerful greeting, the sympathetic look -- these the patient understands.

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.

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

A physician who treats himself has a fool for a patient.

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

The trained nurse has become one of the great blessings of humanity, taking a place beside the physician and the priest.

Learn to accept in silence the minor aggravations, cultivate the gift of taciturnity, and consume your own smoke with an extra draft of hard work, so that those about you may not be annoyed with the dust and soot of your complaints.

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.