QUOTES BY William Osler

Common sense in matters medical is rare, and is usually in inverse ratio to the degree of education.

The trained nurse has become one of the great blessings of humanity, taking a place beside the physician and the priest, and not inferior to either in her mission.

When schemes are laid in advance, it is surprising how often the circumstances fit in with them.

We can only instill principles, put the student in the right path, give him method, teach him how to study, and early to discern between essentials and non-essentials.

To study the phenomenon of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.

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.

Shakespeare gets to the root of the alcohol question in his well-known statement—'Good wine is a good, familiar creature if it be well used.'

The best preparation for tomorrow is to do today's work superbly well.

In the history of medicine, there are few instances in which a disease has been more accurately, more graphically or more briefly described.

Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science.

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.