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.
William OslerRead
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.
Interpretation
The importance of balancing theoretical knowledge with practical experience in medicine.
William Osler emphasizes the necessity of both studying academic literature and engaging with real patients in the field of medicine. He likens the process of learning solely from books to trying to navigate the sea without ever setting sail, highlighting that both knowledge and experience are crucial for a complete education in healthcare.
In practice
During a medical seminar, to stress the importance of hands-on training, a speaker might say this quote.
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.
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.
One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.
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.
Let each hour of the day have its allotted duty, and cultivate that power of concentration which grows with its exercise.
It is paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play without seeing the vital connection between them.
Give your child a single valuable idea, and you have done more for his education than if you had laid upon his mind the burden of bushels of information.
The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn.
Of all the inanimate objects, of all men's creations, books are the nearest to us for they contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to the truth, and our persistent leanings to error. But most of all they resemble us in their precious hold on life.
All a child's life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes β morals, behaviour, everything. Absolute trust in some one else is the essence of education.
Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark all is deluge.
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