There is no disease more conducive to clinical humility than aneurysm of the aorta.
Without faith a man can do nothing; with it all things are possible.
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 successful teacher is no longer on a height, pumping knowledge at high pressure into passive receptacles...
Patients should have rest, food, fresh air, and exercise – the quadrangle of health.
The value of experience is not in seeing much, but in seeing wisely.
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.
Things cannot always go your way. Learn to accept in silence the minor aggravations, cultivate the gift of taciturnity and consume your own smoke with an extra draught of hard work, so that those about you may not be annoyed with the dust and soot of your complaints.
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?