Osler Medical Quotes

By the end of medical school, most students tended to focus on "lifestyle" specialities - those with more humane hours, higher salaries, and lower pressures - the idealism of their med school application essays tempered or lost. As graduation neared and we sat down, in a Yale tradition, to re-write our commencement oath - a melding of the words of Hippocrates, Maimonides, Osler, along with a few other great medical forefathers - several students argued for the removal of language insisting that we place our patients' interests above our own. (The rest of us didn't allow this discussion to continue for long. The words stayed. This kind of egotism struck me as antithetical to medicine and, it should be noted, entirely reasonable. Indeed, this is how 99 percent of people select their jobs: pay, work environment, hours. But thats the point. Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job - not a calling).

The Anatomy of Melancholy was regarded by Sir William Osler, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford (1905–19), as the greatest medical treatise every written by a layman.

The young doctor should look about early for an avocation, a pastime, that will take him away from patients, pills, and potions.

William Osler, the physician who wrote The Principles and Practice of Medicine in 1892, once told a group of medical students: Banish the future. Live only for the hour and its allotted work. Think not of the amount to be accomplished, the difficulties to be overcome, or the end to be attained, but set earnestly at the little task at your elbow, letting that be sufficient for the day; for surely our plain duty is, as Carlyle says, “Not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.

Society would have much to gain from decriminalization. On the immediate practical level, we would feel safer in our homes and on our streets and much less concerned about the danger of our cars being burgled. In cities like Vancouver such crimes are often committed for the sake of obtaining drug money. More significantly perhaps, by exorcising this menacing devil of our own creation, we would automatically give up a lot of unnecessary fear. We could all breathe more freely. Many addicts could work at productive jobs if the imperative of seeking illegal drugs did not keep them constantly on the street. It’s interesting to learn that before the War on Drugs mentality took hold in the early twentieth century, a prominent individual such as Dr. William Stewart Halsted, a pioneer of modern surgical practice, was an opiate addict for over forty years. During those decades he did stellar and innovative work at Johns Hopkins University, where he was one of the four founding physicians. He was the first, for example, to insist that members of his surgical team wear rubber gloves — a major advance in eradicating post-operative infections. Throughout his career, however, he never got by with less than 180 milligrams of morphine a day. “On this,” said his colleague, the world-renowned Canadian physician Sir William Osler, “he could do his work comfortably and maintain his excellent vigor.” As noted at the Common Sense for Drug Policy website: Halsted’s story is revealing not only because it shows that with a morphine addiction the proper maintenance dose can be productive. It also illustrates the incredible power of the drug in question. Here was a man with almost unlimited resources — moral, physical, financial, medical — who tried everything he could think of and he was hooked until the day he died. Today we would send a man like that to prison. Instead he became the father of modern surgery.

William Osler, often referred to as the father of modern medicine, told a graduating class of medical students: "A distressing feature in the life of which you are about to enter...is the uncertainty which pertains not alone to our science and art, but to the very hopes and fears which make us men. In seeking out the absolute truth we aim for the unattainable, and must be content with finding broken portions.

In one of Dr. Westman’s recent studies, 84 obese diabetics followed a strict low-carbohydrate diet—no wheat, cornstarch, sugars, potatoes, rice, or fruit, reducing carbohydrate intake to 20 grams per day (similar to Drs. Osler and Banting’s early-twentieth-century practices). After six months, waistlines (representative of visceral fat) were reduced by over 5 inches, triglycerides dropped by 70 mg/dl, weight dropped 24.5 pounds, and HbA1c was reduced from 8.8 to 7.3 percent. And 95 percent of participants were able to reduce diabetes medications, while 25 percent were able to eliminate medications, including insulin, altogether.35

It is only by the methodical examination of every system and organ that we get those comprehensive facts from which we can draw reasonably safe inductions. UNPUBLISHED DRAFT OF AN ADDRESS TO MEDICAL STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, 1885. PUBLISHED PRIVATELY BY THE OSLER LIBRARY, MCGILL UNIVERSITY, MONTREAL, 2006.

It is much more important to know what kind of patient has the disease than what sort of disease the person has,” Osler instructed his trainees at the turn of the twentieth century.

Sir William Osler, the first Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins Medical School and a unique teacher and clinician, said: “One of the first duties of the physician is to educate… [people] not to take medicine.” You should not assume a physician is inadequate if he does not give a prescription at the end of your visit.