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
The young physician starts life with 20 drugs for each disease, and the old physician ends life with one drug for 20 diseases.
Interpretation
Knowledge and experience lead to a simpler, more effective approach in medicine and life.
This quote by William Osler highlights the contrast between the complexities of a novice's approach to medicine and the wisdom gained through experience. As a young physician, one may feel the need to rely on a multitude of treatments for each condition, while an experienced physician finds that understanding the core principles allows them to address many ailments with fewer, but more potent remedies.
In practice
In a health seminar, to emphasize the importance of experience in treatment.
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.
Let each hour of the day have its allotted duty, and cultivate that power of concentration which grows with its exercise.
Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.
A house cannot be made habitable in a day; and, after all, how few days go to make up a century.
Knowledge is simply a kind of fuel; it needs the motor of understanding to convert it into power.
Fools admire, but men of sense approve.
Fail, fail again, fail better.
With ills unending strives the putter off.
What you donβt know, you canβt tell. Or made to tell.
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