 It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has. |
| The first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine. |
| Soap and water and common sense are the best disinfectants. |
| The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals. |
| The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism. |
| He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all. |
| 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. |
| The value of experience is not in seeing much, but in seeing wisely. |
| The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow. |
| 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. |
| No bubble is so iridescent or floats longer than that blown by the successful teacher. |
| There are, in truth, no specialties in medicine, since to know fully many of the most important diseases a man must be familiar with their manifestations in many organs. |
| The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease. |
| It is much simpler to buy books than to read them and easier to read them than to absorb their contents. |
| The very first step towards success in any occupation is to become interested in it. |
| 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. |
| In seeking absolute truth we aim at the unattainable and must be content with broken portions. |
| There is no disease more conducive to clinical humility than aneurysm of the aorta. |
| What is the student but a lover courting a fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp? |
| To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals - this alone is worth the struggle. |
