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
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.
Breathes there a man with soul so dead that it does not glow at the thought of what the men of his blood have done and suffered to make his country what it is? There is room, plenty of room, for proper pride of land and birth. What I inveigh against is a cursed spirit of intolerance, conceived in distrust and bred in ignorance, that makes the mental attitude perennially antagonistic, even bitterly antagonistic, to everything foreign, that subordinates everywhere the race to the nation, forgetting the higher claims of human brotherhood.
Too many men slip early out of the habit of studious reading, and yet that is essential.
To do today's work well and not to bother about tomorrow is the secret of accomplishment
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.
To know just what has do be done, then to do it, comprises the whole philosophy of practical life.
Avoid wine and women - choose a freckly-faced girl for a wife; they are invariably more amiable.
What is patience but an equanimity which enables you to rise superior to the trials of life.
No dreams, no visions, no delicious fantasies, no castles in the air, with which, as the old song so truly says, hearts are broken, heads are turned.
One special advantage of the skeptical attitude of mind is that a man is never vexed to find that after all he has been in the wrong.
The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and beget.
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.
Perhaps no sin so easily besets us as a sense of self-satisfied superiority to others.
As it can be maintained that all the great advances have come from men under forty, so the history of the world shows that a very large proportion of the evils may be traced to the sexagenarians, nearly all the great mistakes politically and socially, all of the worst poems, most of the bad pictures, a majority of the bad novels and not a few of the bad sermons and speeches.