William Osler

“ The load of to-morrow, added to that of yesterday, carried to-day makes the strongest falter. Shut off the future as tightly as the past. 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." To youth, we are told, belongs the future, but the wretched to-morrow that so plagues some of us has no certainty, except through to-day. Who can tell what a day may bring forth? Though its uncertainty is a proverb, a man may carry its secret in the hollow of his hand. ”

“ There is no place for despondency or despair. As for the dour dyspeptics in mind and morals who sit idly croaking like ravens,—let them come into the arena, let them wrestle for their flesh and blood against the principalities and powers represented by bad air and worse houses, by drink and disease, by needless pain, and by the loss annually to the state of thousands of valuable lives—let them fight for the day when a man's life shall be more precious than gold. Now, alas! the cheapness of life is every day's tragedy! ”

“ Phenomena are thought out in terms not of origins merely, but of one origin, and that one origin is the only mystery that remains. This unification of the sciences has always been and must still remain the dream and the faith and the inspiration of the scientific man, and could such an edifice of the intellect ever be realized, the task of science would have been completed. Only when this purely deterministic method has been pushed as far as it will go does science leave off; only where science leaves off does philosophy begin. ”

“ The man's college output is never to be gauged at sight; all the world's coarse thumb and finger may fail to plumb his most effective work, the casting of the mental machinery of self-education, the true preparation for a field larger than the college campus. Four or five hours daily—it is not much to ask; but one day must tell another, one week certify another, one month bear witness to another of the same story, and you will acquire a habit by which the one-talent man will earn a high interest, and by which the ten-talent man may at least save his capital. ”

“ Enough to say that war blasts the soul, and in this great conflict the finer sense of humanity has been shocked to paralysis by the helplessness of our civilization and the futility of our religion to stem a wave of primitive barbarism. Black as are the written and unwritten pages of history, the concentrated and prolonged martyrdom surpasses anything man has yet had to endure. ”

“ Groping between what Sir Thomas Browne so finely calls "the night of our forebeing" and the unknown future—the dark before and after, he at last came to himself, and with the help of this key unlocked the mysteries of Nature, and found a way of physical salvation.
Man's redemption of man is the great triumph of Greek thought. The tap-root of modern science sinks deep in Greek soil, the astounding fertility of which is one of the out-standing facts of history. ”

“ We do not forget the magnitude of his labors, but a new generation has new problems—his message was not for you—but that medicine today runs in larger moulds and turns out finer castings is due to his life and work. It is one of the values of lectures on the history of medicine to keep alive the good influences of great men even after their positive teaching is antiquated. Let no man be so foolish as to think that he has exhausted any subject for his generation. Virchow was not happy when he saw the young men pour into the old bottle of cellular pathology the new wine of bacteriology. ”

“ But to exalt in this way its ideal of proof, the old logic had to pay a heavy price. The price was cutting the ideal wholly adrift from the actual, contemplating exclusively a situation which could never occur in real life, and leaving all actual inquiry to its devices, unstudied, uncriticized, and unaided. Thus, the splendid aloofness of the logical ideal was purchased by a total repudiation of actual science. To many philosophic minds this price does not seem excessive. The more useless truth is made to appear, the purer and more admirable it seems to them. ”

“ The quiet life in day-tight compartments will help you to bear your own and others' burdens with a light heart. Pay no heed to the Batrachians who sit croaking idly by the stream. Life is a straight, plain business, and the way is clear, blazed for you by generations of strong men, into whose labours you enter and whose ideals must be your inspiration. In my mind's eye I can see you twenty years hence—resolute-eyed, broad-headed, smooth-faced men who are in the world to make a success of life ”

“ When the wild beast of Plato's dream becomes a waking reality, and a herd-emotion of hate sweeps a nation off its feet, the desolation that follows is wider than that in France and Belgium, wider even than the desolation of grief, and something worse—the hardened heart, the lie in the soul—so graphically described in Book II of the "Republic"—that forces us to do accursed things, and even to defend them! ”

“ The Psalmist will have it that no man may redeem his brother, but this redemption of his body has been bought at a price of the lives of those who have sought out Nature's processes by study and experiment. Silent workers, often unknown and neglected by their generation, these men have kept alive the fires on the altars of science, and have so opened the doors of knowledge that we now know the laws of health and disease. Time will only permit me to refer to a few of the more important of the measures of man's physical redemption. ”

“ Side by side, as substance and shadow—"in the dark backward and abysm of time," in the dawn of the great civilizations of Egypt and Babylon, in the bright morning of Greece, and in the full noontide of modern life, together have grown up these two diametrically opposite views of man's relation to nature, and more particularly of his personal relation to the agencies of disease. ”