Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The higher the standard of education in a profession, the less marked will be the charlatanism.
That man can interrogate as well as observe nature was a lesson slowly learned in his evolution.
Avoid wine and women - choose a freckly-faced girl for a wife; they are invariably more amiable.
The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.
To know just what has do be done, then to do it, comprises the whole philosophy of practical life.
The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.
The person who takes medicine must recover twice, once from the disease and once from the medicine.
When schemes are laid in advance, it is surprising how often the circumstances will fit in with them.
We are constantly misled by the ease with which our minds fall into the ruts of one or two experiences
It is much simpler to buy books than to read them and easier to read them than to absorb their contents.
The great majority gave no signs one way or the other; like birth, their death was a sleep and a forgetting.
If it were not for the great variability among individuals, medicine might as well be a science, not an art.
The Scots are the backbone of Canada. They are all right in their three vital parts - head, heart and haggis.
The successful teacher is no longer on a height, pumping knowledge at high pressure into passive receptacles.
Start at once a bedside library and spend the last half hour of the day in communion with the saints of humanity.
It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.
To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals - this alone is worth the struggle.
There are only two sorts of doctors; those who practise with their brains, and those who practise with their tongues.
The trained nurse has become one of the great blessings of humanity, taking a place beside the physician and the priest.
Patients rarely die of the disease from which they suffer. Secondary or terminal infections are the real cause of death.
Let each hour of the day have its allotted duty, and cultivate that power of concentration which grows with its exercise.
A library represents the mind of its collector, fancies and foibles, strengths and weaknesses, prejudices and preferences.
Acquire the art of detachment, the virtue of method, and the quality of thoroughness, but above all the grace of humility.
We are all dietetic sinners; only a small percent of what we eat nourishes us; the balance goes to waste and loss of energy.
The young physician starts life with 20 drugs for each disease, and the old physician ends life with one drug for 20 diseases.
Humanity has but three great enemies: fever, famine, and war; of these by far the greatest, by far the most terrible, is fever.
The young doctor should look about early for an avocation, a pastime, that will take him away from patients, pills, and potions.
Shed, as you do your garments, your daily sins, whether of omission or commission, and you will wake a free man, with a new life.
For the general practitioner a well-used library is one of the few correctives of the premature senility which is so apt to take him.
He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all.
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.
It is strange how the memory of a man may float to posterity on what he would have himself regarded as the most trifling of his works.
The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.
Gentlemen, I have a confession to make. Half of what we have taught you is in error, and furthermore we cannot tell you which half it is
We doctors have always been a simple trusting folk. Did we not believe Galen implicitly for 1500 years and Hippocrates for more than 2000?
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.
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 practice of medicine is an art, not a trade; a calling, not a business; a calling in which your heart will be exercised equally with your head.
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.
The future belongs to Science. More and more she will control the destinies of the nations. Already she has them in her crucible and on her balances.
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.
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.
It is not as if our homeopathic brothers are asleep: far from it, they are awake - many of them at any rate - to the importance of the scientific study of disease.
There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language.
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.
Now the way of life that I preach is a habit to be acquired gradually by long and steady repetition. It is the practice of living for the day only, and for the day's work.
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.
Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day absorb all your interest, energy and enthusiasm. The best preparation for tomorrow is to live today superbly well.
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.
The teacher's life should have three periods, study until twenty-five, investigation until forty, profession until sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance.