Better Left Unsaid

"Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought." - Sir William Osler

Sir William, a Canadian, is known as the Father of Modern Medicine. His "greatest contribution to medicine was to insist that students learned from seeing and talking to patients. He liked to say, 'He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all.' He is also remembered for saying, 'If you listen carefully to the patient they will tell you the diagnosis'." Sort of like the original Dr. House.

Most interesting, and disturbing to some, was the speech he gave when he was in his mid-fifties "which envisaged a College where men retired at 67 and after a contemplative period of a year were 'peacefully extinguished' by chloroform. He claimed that, 'the effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty' and it was downhill from then on. (His) speech was covered by the popular press which headlined their reports with 'Osler recommends chloroform at sixty'."