Great Throughts Treasury

"I desire no other epitaph? than the statement that I taught medical students in the wards, as I regard this as by far the most useful and important work I have been called upon to do."

"I have an enduring faith in the men who do the routine work of our profession. Hard though the conditions may be, approached in the right spirit ? the spirit which has animated us from the days of Hippocrates ? the practice of medicine affords scope for the exercise of the best faculties of the mind and heart."

"I have had three personal ideals. One is to do the day?s work well and not to bother about tomorrow. ? The second ideal has been to act the Golden Rule, as far as in me lay, towards my professional brethren and towards the patients committed to my care. And the third has been to cultivate such a measure of equanimity as would enable me to bear success with humility, the affections of my friends without pride and to be ready when the day of sorrow and grief came to meet it with the courage befitting a man."

"I have had three personal ideals: One to do the day's work well and not to bother about tomorrow. You may say that is not a satisfactory ideal. It is; and there is not one which the student can carry with him into practice with greater effect. To it more than anything else I owe whatever success I have had ? to this power of settling down to the day's work and trying to do it well to the best of my ability, and letting the future take care of itself."

"I propose to consider another aspect of our work of equal importance, neither scientific nor educational, but what may be called humanistic, as it deals with our mutual relations and with the public. Nothing in life is more glaring than the contrast between possibilities and actualities, between the ideal and the real. ? The desire for unity, the wish for peace, the longing for concord, deeply implanted in the human heart, have stirred the most powerful emotions of the race, and have been responsible for some of its noblest actions. It is but a sentiment, you may say: but is not the world ruled by feeling and by passion?"

"Imperturbability means coolness and presence of mind under all circumstances, calmness amid storm, clearness of judgment in moments of grave peril, immobility, impassiveness, or, to use an old and expressive word, phlegm."

"In a true and perfect form, imperturbability is indissolubly associated with wide experience and an intimate knowledge of the varied aspects of disease. With such advantages he is so equipped that no eventuality can disturb the mental equilibrium of the physician; the possibilities are always manifest, and the course of action clear. From its very nature this precious quality is liable to be misinterpreted, and the general accusation of hardness, so often brought against the profession, has here its foundation. Now a certain measure of insensibility is not only an advantage, but a positive necessity in the exercise of a calm judgment, and in carrying out delicate operations. Keen sensibility is doubtless a virtue of high order, when it does not interfere with steadiness of hand or coolness of nerve; but for the practitioner in his working-day world, a callousness which thinks only of the good to be effected, and goes ahead regardless of smaller considerations, is the preferable quality. Cultivate, then, gentlemen, such a judicious measure of obtuseness as will enable you to meet the exigencies of practice with firmness and courage, without, at the same time, hardening "the human heart by which we live.""

"In no relationship is the physician more often derelict than in his duty to himself."

"In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs."

"In seeking absolute truth we aim at the unattainable and must be content with broken portions."

"In taking histories, follow each line of thought; ask no leading questions; never suggest. Give the patient's own words in the complaint."

"In the first place, in the physician or surgeon no quality takes rank with imperturbability, and I propose for a few minutes to direct your attention to this essential bodily virtue."

"In the history of medicine, there are few instances in which a disease has been more accurately, more graphically or more briefly described."

"Indicating that varicose veins are hereditary."

"It cannot be too often or too forcibly brought home to us that the hope of the profession is with the men [and women] who do its daily work in general practice."

"It goes without saying that no man can teach successfully who is not at the same time a student."

"It has been said that ?in patience ye shall win your souls,? and what is this patience but an equanimity which enables you to rise superior to the trials of life?"

"It helps a man immensely to be a bit of a hero-worshipper, and the stories of the lives of the masters of medicine do much to stimulate our ambition and rouse our sympathies."

"It is a good many years since I sat on the benches, but I am happy to say that I am still a medical student, and still feel that I have much to learn."

"It is astonishing with how little reading a doctor can practice medicine, but is not astonishing how badly he may do it."

"It is much simpler to buy books than to read them and easier to read them than to absorb their contents."

"It is not the delicate neurotic person who is prone to angina, but the robust, the vigorous in mind and body, the keen and ambitious man, the indicator of whose engines is always at full speed ahead."

"It is strange how the memory of a man may float to posterity on what he would have himself regarded as the most trifling of his works."

"Laughter is the music of life."

"Learn to accept in silence the minor aggravations, cultivate the gift of taciturnity, and consume your own smoke with an extra draft of hard work, so that those about you may not be annoyed with the dust and soot of your complaints."

"Learn to see, learn to hear, learn to feel, learn to smell and know that by practice alone can you become experts."

"Let me congratulate you on the choice of calling which offers a combination of intellectual and moral interests found in no other profession ? a combination which, in the words of Sir James Paget, ?offers the most complete and constant union of those three qualities which have the greatest charm for pure and active minds ? novelty, utility, and charity.?"

"Let me recall to your minds an incident related of that best of men and wisest of rulers, Antoninus Pius, who, as he lay dying, in his home at Loriam in Etruria, summed up the philosophy of life in the watchword, Aequanimitas. ? Natural temperament has much to do with its development, but a clear knowledge of our relation to our fellow-creatures and to the work of life is also indispensable. One of the first essentials in securing a good-natured equanimity is not to expect too much of the people amongst whom you dwell."

"Linked together by the strong bonds of community of interests, the profession of medicine forms a remarkable world-unit in the progressive evolution of which there is a fuller hope for humanity than in any other direction."

"Listen to your patient; he is telling you the diagnosis."

"Literature is full of examples of remarkable cures through the influence of the imagination, which is only an active phase of faith."

"Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition."

"Look wise say nothing and grunt, speech was given to conceal thought."

"Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability."

"Medicine is learned by the bedside and not in the class room. Let not your conception of manifestations of disease come from work heard in the lecture room or read from the book: see and then research, compare and control. But see first."

"More clearly than any other the physician should illustrate the truth of Plato?s saying that education is a life-long process."

"My second fixed idea is the uselessness of men above sixty years of age, and the incalculable benefit it would be in commercial, political, and in professional life, if as a matter of course, men stopped work at this age."

"Nationalism has been the great curse of humanity. In no other shape has the Demon of Ignorance assumed more hideous proportions; to no other obsession do we yield ourselves more readily. For whom do the hosannas ring higher than for the successful butcher of tens of thousands of poor fellows who have been made to pass through the fire to this Moloch of nationalism ? A vice of the blood, of the plasm rather, it runs riot in the race, and rages today as of yore in spite of the precepts of religion and the practice of democracy. Nor is there any hope of change; the pulpit is dumb, the press fans the flames, literature panders to it and the people love to have it so. Not that all aspects of nationalism are bad. 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."

"Never ask a new patient a question without a notebook and pencil in hand."

"Never forget to look at the back of a patient. Always look at the feet. Looking at a woman's legs has often saved her life."

"No bubble is so iridescent or floats longer than that blown by the successful teacher."

"No dreams, no visions, no delicious fantasies, no castles in the air, with which, as the old song so truly says, hearts are broken, heads are turned."

"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."

"Nothing in life is more wonderful than faith ? the one great moving force which we can neither weigh in the balance nor test in the crucible. Intangible as the ether, ineluctable as gravitation, the radium of the moral and mental spheres, mysterious, indefinable, known only by its effects, faith pours out an unfailing stream of energy while abating nor jot nor tittle of its potency. Well indeed did St. Paul break out into the well-known glorious panegyric, but even this scarcely does justice to the Hertha of the psychical world, distributing force as from a great storage battery without money and without price to the children of men. Three of its relations concern us here. The most active manifestations are in the countless affiliations which man in his evolution has worked out with the unseen, with the invisible powers, whether of light or of darkness, to which from time immemorial he has erected altars and shrines. To each one of the religions, past or present, faith has been the Jacob's ladder. Creeds pass, an inexhaustible supply of faith remains, with which man proceeds to rebuild temples, churches, chapels and shrines."

"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 poetry of the commonplace, of the plain, toil-worn woman, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and their griefs."

"Now of the difficulties bound up with the public in which we doctors work, I hesitate to speak in a mixed audience. Common sense in matters medical is rare, and is usually in inverse ratio to the degree of education."

"Now the way of life that I preach is a habit to be acquired gradually by long and steady repetition. It is the practice of living for the day only, and for the day's work."

"Observations are made with accuracy and care, no pains are spared, nothing is thought a trouble in the investigation of a problem. The facts are looked at in connection with similar ones, their relation to others is studied, and the experience of the recorder is compared with that of others who have worked upon the question."

"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."

"One finger in the throat and one in the rectum makes a good diagnostician."