William Osler Quotes

Was this an old disease, and, if so, which one? If it was new, what did that say about the state of medical knowledge? And in any case, how could physicians make sense of it?

I think it is absolutely crazy in this day and age that I have to go through a trial and error method to see if my child is allergic to an antibiotic or peanuts. I should just know.

It is very difficult to clinically diagnose someone who is dead.

You can't really accurately diagnose someone, I think. Or I've been told that.

When you do not know the nature of the malady, leave it to nature; do not strive to hasten matters. For either nature will bring about the cure or it will itself reveal clearly what the malady really is.

As far as physicians go, chance is more valuable than knowledge.

Our great struggle in medicine these days is not just with ignorance and uncertainty. It's also with complexity: how much you have to make sure you have in your head and think about. There are a thousand ways things can go wrong.

At the time I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease, my doctors told me that I had an incurable illness and they didn't know much about it.

It's not at all good when your cancer is 'palpable' from the outside. Especially when, as at this stage, they didn't even know where the primary source was. Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, from the outside in.

In 1880 at the Military Hospital at Constantine, I discovered, on the edges of the pigmented spherical bodies in the blood of a patient suffering from malaria, filiform elements resembling flagellae which were moving very rapidly, displacing the neighbouring red cells.

We'd like to have immediate answers to all of our questions. I think medicine in particular. I found it frustrating as a physician sometimes to not be able to tell someone exactly why something was happening to them. There are still so many mysteries in medicine.

Doctors didn't know what to do with me.

If your doctor tells you you have a rare disease that he or she has never seen, if you've got an incurable cancer, boy, don't accept that. You know, go and get a second opinion.

To the medical man, astrology is invaluable in diagnosing diseases and prescribing a remedy, for it reveals the hidden cause of all ailments.

The goal of NIH research is to acquire new knowledge to help prevent, detect, diagnose, and treat disease and disability, from the rarest genetic disorder to the common cold.

Those weeks before diagnosis can be among the most torturous times. There is a reason you're called a patient once the plastic bracelet goes on.

In medical school, it's quite possible to get taught that you can diagnose everybody and treat everything. But then you get out in the real world and find that for most patients walking through your door, you have no idea what's causing their symptoms.

Remedies, indeed, are our great analysers of disease.

Just think of what a world it would be if we could measure the characteristics of your body when you get sick and transmit those directly to a doctor or a computer. You could get diagnosed and cured instantly and wirelessly.

When you're trained in medicine and it's the '80s and you've got all this hi-tech stuff and this ability to diagnose everything, when you not only couldn't make a diagnosis, you didn't know what the problem was, and you didn't know how to treat it, it was devastating.

Let's not forget, we are all one diagnosis away from having a pre-existing condition.

There are some modern practitioners, who declaim against medical theory in general, not considering that to think is to theorize; and that no one can direct a method of cure to a person labouring under disease, without thinking, that is, without theorizing; and happy therefore is the patient, whose physician possesses the best theory.

Fundamentalists who say they are not going to pay any attention to the charts are like a doctor who says he's not going to take a patient's temperature.

Physicians, when the cause of disease is discovered, consider that the cure is discovered.

The doctor looked at my cardiogram and made that "hmmmm" noise that doctors are taught in medical school so they won't come right out and say "UH-oh!"