"If you listen carefully to the patient they will tell you the diagnosis."   
-Sir William Osler (1849-1919)

   The millions of doctors who have traveled the hard but crucial pathway through residency training may thank (or curse) Dr. William Osler (left) for their experience. It was Osler who taught that direct experience with the patient was crucial to medical education. You can’t learn it in laboratories or books alone, he preached. You have to be present to the patient. The founder of modern medicine was born in the summer of 1849. His life in medicine is iconic to all western-trained doctors. What was so important about his work?…

   Osler’s legacy is so great that it touches each caregiver’s life. Until Osler, physicians believed they could learn medicine primarily by studying cadavers, reading anatomy books, and performing experiments in the laboratory. They were distant from patients until the time they were suddenly cast into direct contact with them. Doctors of the late 19th century sometimes adopted an arrogant distance from their patients because that is how they were taught in the medical schools of the times.

Osler applied a notion that seems like so much common sense today. Talk to the patient, listen to the patient, question the patient, be present to the patient. These were the hallmarks of Osler’s work. One wonders, though, how well doctors practice this wisdom today.
   Technology has sent the signal that the patient’s problems may well be determined by images on a screen and computer-based diagnoses. Indeed, these tools are extremely valuable.
   But as we have said so often in this Journal. Disconnection from the patient as a human being is also the plague of modern medicine. We patients desire the genuine human attention of the physician as well as his or her treatment skills.
   As Dr. Osler himself said in one of his many, oft-quoted phrases,  "It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has."
   Osler’s genius lay in his ability to rediscover what medicine then (and now) had been losing. Medicine is about treating people, not about treating diseases. It is an intensely human practice and therefore, it requires intense humanity to practice it well. This means all doctors, to be truly fine physicians, must practice Love.
   If you didn’t know much about William Osler before today, you may now say you know something about the father of modern medicine. He was, above all, a great humanitarian.
   I like the language Osler picked to comment on his own life’s work.
   "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."

-Erie Chapman

More quotes from the eminently quotable Osler. Which is your favorite?:

It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.

One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.

The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.

The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.

To study the phenomena of disease without books is
to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not
to go to sea at all.

We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from it.