Sir William Osler, 1st Baronet (July 12, 1849 – December 29, 1919) was a Canadian physician. He has been called one of the greatest icons of modern medicine.
Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.
One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.
The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.
Soap and water and common sense are the best disinfectants.

The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.
Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease.
We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from life.

The best preparation for tomorrow is to do today's work superbly well.

12 July 1849 – 29 December 1919

William Osler was born in a remote part of Ontario known as Bond Head. He spent a year at Trinity College in Ontario before deciding on a career in medicine. He attended the Toronto Medical College for two years and in 1872 received his M.D. degree from McGill University in Montreal. Like many of his fellow physicians trained in Canada, Osler went abroad for postgraduate study. He studied in London, Berlin, and Vienna before returning to Canada in 1874 and joining the medical faculty at McGill. A year later he was promoted to professor. Osler was elected a fellow of the British Royal College of Physicians in 1883, one of only two Canadian fellows at that time. In 1884 he left Montreal for Philadelphia to become professor of clinical medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
William Osler’s book, The Principles and Practice of Medicine, first published in 1892, supported his imaginative new curriculum. It was based upon the advances in medical science of the previous fifty years and remained the standard text on clinical medicine for the next forty years.
Osler, a superb diagnostician and clinician, was greatly esteemed by his peers in this country and abroad. In 1905 he accepted the Regius Professorship of Medicine at Oxford University, at the time the most prestigious medical appointment in the English-speaking world. He left Maryland with warm feelings for Hopkins knowing that his sixteen years spent had laid a solid foundation for the future of Hopkins medical education.
https://www.medicalarchives.jhmi.edu/osler/biography.htm

Dr. Osler in the Almshouse
Reader's Digest had a series of paintings illustrating the life of Sir William Osler. Dr. Osler was a prominent nineteenth-century physician, and a founder of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore.

The Faith that Heals (1910)
Nothing in life is more wonderful than faith — the one great moving force which we can neither weigh in the balance nor test in the crucible.
To each one of the religions, past or present, faith has been the Jacob's ladder. Creeds pass, an inexhaustible supply of faith remains, with which man proceeds to rebuild temples, churches, chapels and shrines.

"The Faith That Heals" British Medical Journal (18 June 1910) p. 1470

* Nothing in life is more wonderful than faith — the one great moving force which we can neither weigh in the balance nor test in the crucible. Intangible as the ether, ineluctable as gravitation, the radium of the moral and mental spheres, mysterious, indefinable, known only by its effects, faith pours out an unfailing stream of energy while abating nor jot nor tittle of its potency. Well indeed did St. Paul break out into the well-known glorious panegyric, but even this scarcely does justice to the Hertha of the psychical world, distributing force as from a great storage battery without money and without price to the children of men.
Three of its relations concern us here. The most active manifestations are in the countless affiliations which man in his evolution has worked out with the unseen, with the invisible powers, whether of light or of darkness, to which from time immemorial he has erected altars and shrines. To each one of the religions, past or present, faith has been the Jacob's ladder. Creeds pass, an inexhaustible supply of faith remains, with which man proceeds to rebuild temples, churches, chapels and shrines.
* A man must have faith in himself to be of any use in the world. There may be very little on which to base it — no matter, but faith in one's powers, in one's mission is essential to success. Confidence once won, the rest follows naturally; and with strong faith in himself a man becomes a local center for its radiation. St. Francis, St. Theresa, Ignatius Loyola, Florence Nightingale, the originator of every cult or sect or profession has possessed this infective faith. And in the ordinary everyday work of the doctor confidence, assurance (in the proper sense of the word) is an asset without which it is very difficult to succeed.
* Faith is indeed one of the miracles of human nature which science is as ready to accept as it is to study its marvellous effects. When we realise what a vast asset it has been in history, the part which it has played in the healing art seems insignificant, and yet there is no department of knowledge more favourable to an impartial study of its effects, and this brings me to my subject — the faith that heals.
* Literature is full of examples of remarkable cures through the influence of the imagination, which is only an active phase of faith.
* While in general use for centuries, one good result of the recent development of mental healing has been to call attention to its great value as a measure to be carefully and scientifically applied in suitable cases. My experience has been that of the unconscious rather than the deliberate faith healer. Phenomenal, even what could be called miraculous, cures are not very uncommon. Like others, I have had cases any one of which, under suitable conditions, could have been worthy of a shrine or made the germ of a pilgrimage.
at: en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Osler