Clifford Allbutt Quotes & Sayings

Students who have attended my [medical] lectures may remember that I try not only to teach them what we know, but also to realise how little this is: in every direction we seem to travel but a very short way before we are brought to a stop; our eyes are opened to see that our path is beset with doubts, and that even our best-made knowledge comes but too soon to an end. — Clifford Allbutt

The use of thesis-writing is to train the mind, or to prove that the mind has been trained; the former purpose is, I trust, promoted, the evidences of the latter are scanty and occasional. — Clifford Allbutt

It is steadily forgotten that health is a diathesis as much as is scrofula or syphilis and that each of these is a mode of growth. — Clifford Allbutt

In science, law is not a rule imposed from without, but an expression of an intrinsic process. The laws of the lawgiver are impotent beside the laws of human nature, as to his disillusion many a lawgiver has discovered. — Clifford Allbutt

Thus we work not in the light of public opinion but in the secrecy of the chamber; and perhaps the best of us are apt at times to forget the delicacies and sincerities which under these conditions are essential to harmony and honour. — Clifford Allbutt

Medicine, likewise, because it deals with things, has always been for our serener circles a Cinderella, blooming maid as happily as she has grown nevertheless. — Clifford Allbutt

I am sick of diseases, I want to know origins and processes ... If we are to prevent disease it is to the beginning of the chain of accumulating stresses that we must look. — Clifford Allbutt

We are led to think of diseases as isolated disturbances in a healthy body, not as the phases of certain periods of bodily development. — Clifford Allbutt