The fundamental activity of medical science is to determine the ultimate causation of disease. — Wilfred Trotter Copy Share Image
The first [quality] to be named must always be the power of attention, of giving one's whole mind to the patient without the interposition of anything of oneself. It sounds simple but only the very greatest doctors ever fully attain it. ... The second thing to be striven for is intuition. This sounds an impossibility, for who can control that… — Wilfred Trotter Copy Share
If mankind is to profit freely from the small and sporadic crop of the heroically gifted it produces, it will have to cultivate the delicate art of handling ideas. Psychology is now able to tell us with reasonable assurance that the most influential obstacle to freedom of thought and to new ideas is fear; and fear which can with inimitable… — Wilfred Trotter Copy Share
The air of caricature never fails to show itself in the products of reason applied relentlessly and without correction. The observation of clinical facts would seem to be a pursuit of the physician as harmless as it is indispensable. [But] it seemed irresistibly rational to certain minds that diseases should be as fully classifiable as are beetles and butterflies. This… — Wilfred Trotter Copy Share
“The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science. If we watch ourselves honestly we shall often find that we have begun to argue against a… — Wilfred Trotter Copy Share
The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It would not… — Wilfred Trotter Copy Share Image
The dispassionate intellect, the open mind, the unprejudiced observer, exist in an exact sense only in a sort of intellectualist folk-lore; states even approaching… — Wilfred Trotter Copy Share Image
If we watch ourselves honestly we shall often find that we have begun to argue against a new idea even before it has been… — Wilfred Trotter Copy Share Image
It is necessary to guard ourselves from thinking that the practice of the scientific method enlarges the powers of the human mind. Nothing is… — Wilfred Trotter Copy Share Image
The truly scientific mind is altogether unafraid of the new, and while having no mercy for ideas which have served their turn or shown… — Wilfred Trotter Copy Share Image
It is sometimes asserted that a surgical operation is or should be a work of art ... fit to rank with those of the… — Wilfred Trotter Copy Share Image
It was not noisy prejudice that caused the work of Mendel to lie dead for thirty years, but the sheer inability of contemporary opinion… — Wilfred Trotter Copy Share Image
