Great Throughts Treasury

"Well-observed facts, though brought to light by passing theories, will never die; they are the material on which alone the house of science will at last be built."

"What we now call an exception is a phenomenon, one or more of whose conditions are unknown. If the conditions of the phenomenon of which we speak were known and determined, there would be no further exceptions: medicine would be as free from them as any other science."

"When a physician is called to a patient, he should decide on the diagnosis, then the prognosis, and then the treatment. ... Physicians must know the evolution of the disease, its duration and gravity in order to predict its course and outcome. Here statistics intervene to guide physicians, by teaching them the proportion of mortal cases, and if observation has also shown that the successful and unsuccessful cases can be recognized by certain signs, then the prognosis is more certain."

"When entering on new ground we must not be afraid to express even risky ideas so as to stimulate research in all directions. As Priestley put it, we must not remain inactive through false modesty based on fear of being mistaken."

"When we meet a fact which contradicts a prevailing theory, we must accept the fact and abandon the theory, even when the theory is supported by great names and generally accepted."

"When he does not know what he ought to want, he should know what his enemy wants - and want the contrary."

"With the aid of these active experimental sciences man becomes an inventor of phenomena, a real foreman of creation; and under this head we cannot set limits to the power that he may gain over nature through future progress of the experimental sciences."

"When one calls a new fact a discovery, the fact itself is not a discovery, but rather the new idea derived from it."