CLINICAL TENETS:

1) “The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease. Care for the patient, not the disease. Care more particularly for the individual patient than for the special features of the disease. It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.” Sir William Osler

2) "The practice of medicine is an art, not a trade; a calling, not a business; a calling in which your heart will be exercised equally with your head." Sir William Osler

3) "The practice of medicine will be very much as you make it - to one a worry, a care, a perpetual annoyance; to another, a daily job and a life of as much happiness and usefulness as can well fall to the lot of man, because it is a life of self-sacrifice and of countless opportunities to comfort and help the weak-hearted, and to raise up those that fall." Sir William Osler

4) "The young physician starts life with 20 drugs for each disease, and the old physician ends life with one drug for 20 diseases." Sir William Osler

5) "Medicine is learned by the bedside and not in the classroom. Let not your conceptions of disease come from words heard in the lecture room or read from the book. See, and then reason and compare and control. But see first. He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all." Sir William Osler

6) "We profess to teach the principles and practice of medicine, or, in other words, the science and art of medicine. Science is knowledge reduced to principles; art is knowledge reduced to practice. The knowing and doing, however, are distinct. Your knowledge, therefore, is useless unless you cultivate the art of healing. Unfortunately, the scientific man very often has the least amount of art, and he is totally unsuccessful in practice; and, on the other hand, there may be much art based on an infinitesimal amount of knowledge, and yet it is sufficient to make its cultivator eminent." ~ Samuel Wilks

7) “Medicine is not only a science; it is also an art. It does not consist of compounding pills and plasters; it deals with the very processes of life, which must be understood before they may be guided.” Paracelsus

8) “To array a man's will against his sickness is the supreme art of medicine.” Henry Ward Beecher AND “Before you heal someone, ask them if he’s willing to give up the things that made him sick.” Hippocrates

9) “Excelsior, higher and higher, but only step by step. “Excelsior, higher and higher, but only step by step.” DD Palmer

10) “Make your decision for what is right, not expedient, and wash your mind of all compromise.” BJ Palmer

11) “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” Ernest Hemingway

12) “Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.” Sir William Osler

13) “As the practice of medicine is not a business and can never be one, the education of the heart - the moral side of the man - must keep pace with the education of the head. Our fellow creatures cannot be dealt with as man deals in corn in coal; the human heart by which we live must control our professional relations.”

14) “Observe, record, tabulate, communicate. Use your five senses. The art of the practice of medicine is to be learned only by experience; ‘tis not an inheritance; it cannot be revealed. Learn to see, learn to hear, learn to feel, learn to smell, and know that by practice alone can you become expert.” Sir William Osler

15) “He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head, and his heart is an artist.” Saint Francis of Assisi

16) “Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature.” Saint Augustine

17) “Perhaps the bigger question is why I make the effort. The short answer is that I read widely to prepare myself for whatever might come along in the clinic. My biggest fear is the one that got away, the important discovery that I missed because I couldn’t see it for what it was. It’s this fear that drives me to cast my intellectual net widely so that I have the broad foundation I need to see my patients from multiple angles. Given the limited number of hours in each day, it can be tempting to read only in my sub-discipline, but I know that doing so would ultimately limit the kinds of connections I can draw. Fortune favors the prepared mind, as Louis Pasteur famously said to explain his scientific success, and I am doing my best to be prepared. Student, you do not study to pass the test. You study to prepare for the day when you are the only thing between a patient and the grave.” Derek Lowe

18) “Each patient is different. Our study is man, as the subject of accidents or disease. Where he always, inside and out, cast in the same mold, instead of differing from his fellow men as much in Constitution and in his reaction to stimulus as in feature, we should air this have reached some settled principles in our art.” Sir William Osler

19) “Love in order to serve medicine. To serve the art of medicine as it should be served, one must love his fellow man. The best part of your work will be your influence and comfort.” Sir William Osler

20) “The plain language of healing is the more useful. And from the standpoint of medicine as an art for the prevention and care of disease, the man who translates the hieroglyphs of science into the plain language of healing is certainly the more useful.” Sir William Osler