By far the most dangerous foe we have to fight is apathy-indifference from whatever cause, not from a lack of knowledge, but from carelessness, from absorption in other pursuits, from a contempt bred of self satisfaction.
Medicine is learned by the bedside and not in the classroom. Let not your conceptions of disease come from words heard in the lecture room or read from the book. See, and then reason and compare and control. But see first.
Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease.
Soap and water and common sense are the best disinfectants.
Every patient you see is a lesson in much more than the malady from which he suffers.
To have a group of cloistered clinicians away completely from the broad current of professional life would be bad for teacher and worse for student. The primary work of a professor of medicine in a medical school is in the wards, teaching his pupils how to deal with patients and their diseases.
The great majority gave no signs one way or the other; like birth, their death was a sleep and a forgetting.
No bubble is so iridescent or floats longer than that blown by the successful teacher.
The young physician starts life with 20 drugs for each disease, and the old physician ends life with one drug for 20 diseases.
Advice is sought to confirm a position already taken.
Varicose veins are the result of an improper selection of grandparents.
We doctors have always been a simple trusting folk. Did we not believe Galen implicitly for 1500 years and Hippocrates for more than 2000?
It is much simpler to buy books than to read them and easier to read them than to absorb their contents.
There are three classes of human beings: men, women and women physicians.
If it were not for the great variability among individuals, medicine might as well be a science, not an art.
Humanity has but three great enemies: fever, famine, and war; of these by far the greatest, by far the most terrible, is fever.
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.
To confess ignorance is often wiser than to beat about the bush with a hypothetical diagnosis.
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 very first step toward success in any occupation is to become interested in it. Locke put this in a very happy way when he said, give a pupil “a relish of knowledge” and you put life into his work.