Motivation Quote by Peter Latham

“Common sense” sounds like the humble cousin of genius, but in Peter Latham’s line it becomes the person actually holding the tools. Calling it “the master workman” reframes medicine as a job site: messy, physical, full of trade-offs, where the best-looking blueprint means nothing if nobody can build the thing. The intent is corrective. It pushes back against medicine as pure theory, pure gadgetry, or pure credentialism, insisting that the highest skill is often judgment: knowing what matters, what can wait, what’s a red flag, what’s noise.

The subtext is a quiet critique of overcomplication. “Common sense” isn’t anti-science here; it’s anti-performance. It’s the reminder that patients aren’t puzzles designed to flatter the doctor’s intellect. They’re people with limited time, money, tolerance for side effects, and trust. A “master workman” doesn’t reach for the fanciest instrument first; they reach for the right one. That includes restraint: not ordering the test that will create more confusion than clarity, not prescribing the drug because it’s new, not mistaking action for care.

Contextually, the phrasing belongs to an older, apprenticeship-flavored view of medicine, when bedside observation and practical heuristics carried more weight than lab-driven certainty. Read today, it lands as a pointed modern warning: in a system crowded with data, protocols, and defensive medicine, common sense is the rare senior craftsperson on the floor, keeping the whole operation from collapsing under its own cleverness.