Great Throughts Treasury

"The best preparation for tomorrow is to do today's work superbly well."

"Care more for the individual patient than for the special features of the disease. . . . Put yourself in his place . . . The kindly word, the cheerful greeting, the sympathetic look — these the patient understands."

"It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has."

"One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine."

"The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest failure which distinguishes man from animals."

"The load of tomorrow, added to that of yesterday, carried today, makes the strongest falter. We must learn to shut off the future as tightly as the past."

"The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and to beget."

"The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow."

"Without faith a man can do nothing; with it all things are possible."

"The greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism."

"History is simply the biography of the mind of man."

"It is more important to know what kind of patient has the disease than what kind of disease the patient has."

"A desire to take medicine is, perhaps, the great feature which distinguishes man from other animals."

"A great many hard things may be said of the work-habit. For most of us it means a hard battle; the few take to it naturally; the many prefer idleness and never learn to love labor."

"A lover of good books is almost always a good [person] and usually a good citizen ? but not always."

"A library represents the mind of its collector, his fancies and foibles, his strength and weakness, his prejudices and preferences. Particularly is this the case if, to the character of a collector, he adds ? or tries to add ? the qualities of a student who wishes to know the books and the lives of the men who wrote them. The friendships of his life, the phases of his growth, the vagaries of his mind, all are represented."

"A rare but still more extraordinary, bodily state as that of progeria, in which, as though touched with the wound of some malign fairy, the child does not remain infantile but skips adolescence, maturity, and manhood, and passes at once to senility, looking at eleven or twelve years like a miniature Tithomus marred and wasted, wrinkled and stunted, a little old man among his toys."

"Acquire the art of detachment, the virtue of method, and the quality of thoroughness, but above all the grace of humility."

"Advice is sought to confirm a position already taken."

"As it can be maintained that all the great advances have come from men under forty, so the history of the world shows that a very large proportion of the evils may be traced to the sexagenarians, nearly all the great mistakes politically and socially, all of the worst poems, most of the bad pictures, a majority of the bad novels and not a few of the bad sermons and speeches."

"Ask not what disease the person has, but rather what person the disease has"

"At the outset do not be worried about this big question?Truth. It is a very simple matter if each one of you starts with the desire to get as much as possible. No human being is constituted to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition. In this unsatisfied quest the attitude of mind, the desire, the thirst?a thirst that from the soul must arise!?the fervent longing, are the be-all and the end-all."

"A patient with a written list of symptoms -- neurasthenia."

"A physician who treats himself has a fool for a patient."

"A man must have faith in himself to be of any use in the world. There may be very little on which to base it ? no matter, but faith in one's powers, in one's mission is essential to success. Confidence once won, the rest follows naturally; and with strong faith in himself a man becomes a local center for its radiation. St. Francis, St. Theresa, Ignatius Loyola, Florence Nightingale, the originator of every cult or sect or profession has possessed this infective faith. And in the ordinary everyday work of the doctor confidence, assurance (in the proper sense of the word) is an asset without which it is very difficult to succeed."

"Avoid wine and women ? choose a freckly-faced girl for a wife; they are invariably more amiable."

"Be calm and strong and patient. Meet failure and disappointment with courage. Rise superior to the trials of life, and never give in to hopelessness or despair. In danger, in adversity, cling to your principles and ideals. Aequanimitas!"

"Begin at once the cultivation of some interest other than the purely professional."

"Breathes there a man with soul so dead that it does not glow at the thought of what the men of his blood have done and suffered to make his country what it is? There is room, plenty of room, for proper pride of land and birth. What I inveigh against is a cursed spirit of intolerance, conceived in distrust and bred in ignorance, that makes the mental attitude perennially antagonistic, even bitterly antagonistic, to everything foreign, that subordinates everywhere the race to the nation, forgetting the higher claims of human brotherhood."

"But do not get too deeply absorbed [in your work] to the exclusion of all outside interests. Success in life depends as much upon the [person] as on the physician. Mix with your fellow students, mingle with their sports and their pleasures. ? You are to be members of a polite as well as of a liberal profession and the more you see of life outside the narrow circle of your work the better equipped you will be for the struggle."

"But whatever you do, take neither yourselves nor your fellow-creatures too seriously. There is tragedy enough in our daily routine, but there is room too for a keen sense of the absurdities and incongruities of life, and in the shifting panorama no one sees better than the doctor the perennial sameness of men?s ways."

"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"

"By the historical method alone can many problems in medicine be approached profitably."

"Common sense in matters medical is rare, and is usually in inverse ratio to the degree of education."

"Courage and cheerfulness will not only carry you over the rough places in life, but will enable you to bring comfort and help to the weak-hearted and will console you in the sad hours"

"Don't touch the patient -- state first what you see, cultivate your powers of observation."

"Engrossed late and soon in professional cares, getting and spending, you may so lay waste your powers that you may find, too late, with hearts given away, that there is no place in your habit-stricken souls for those gentler influences which make your life worth living."

"Even in populous districts, the practice of medicine is a lonely road which winds up-hill all the way and a man may easily go astray and never reach the Delectable Mountains unless he early finds those shepherd guides of whom Bunyan tells, Knowledge, Experience, Watchful, and Sincere."

"Every one of you will have to face the ordeal of every student in this generation who sooner or later tries to mix the waters of science with the oil of faith. You can have a good deal of both if you only keep them separate. The worry comes from the attempt at mixture."

"Failure to examine the throat is a glaring sin of omission, especially in children. One finger in the throat and one in the rectum makes a good diagnostician."

"Faith is a most precious commodity, without which we should be very badly off."

"Faith is indeed one of the miracles of human nature which science is as ready to accept as it is to study its marvelous effects. When we realize what a vast asset it has been in history, the part which it has played in the healing art seems insignificant, and yet there is no department of knowledge more favorable to an impartial study of its effects, and this brings me to my subject ? the faith that heals."

"Fed on the dry husks of facts, the human heart has a hidden want which science cannot supply."

"Fifteen or twenty minutes day by day will give you fellowship with the great minds of the race, and little by little as the years pass you extend your friendship with the immortal dead. They will give you faith in your own day."

"For the general practitioner a well-used library is one of the few correctives of the premature senility which is so apt to take him."

"Gentlemen, I have a confession to make. Half of what we have taught you is in error, and furthermore we cannot tell you which half it is."

"Half of us are blind, few of us feel, and we are all deaf."

"He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all."

"Hilarity and good humor, a breezy cheerfulness? help enormously both in the study and in the practice of medicine."

"Humanity has but three great enemies: fever, famine, and war; of these by far the greatest, by far the most terrible, is fever."