Life & Wisdom Quote by Martin H. Fischer

Medicine’s most dangerous mistake is often not ignorance but imagination. “In diagnosis think of the easy first” is Fischer’s terse rebuke to the clinician’s appetite for drama: the seductive leap to the rare, the exotic, the career-making case. It’s a line that sounds like common sense until you notice how often it’s violated, especially in systems that reward cleverness over clarity.

The specific intent is practical triage for the mind. Start with what’s common, test what’s cheap, rule out what’s reversible. It’s the diagnostic version of “check the batteries” before rewriting the operating system. The subtext is sharper: diagnostic virtuosity can become vanity, and vanity has a body count. Fischer is warning against the intellectual thrill of “zebras” when the room is full of horses.

Context matters. Fischer straddled an era when modern laboratory medicine was accelerating, but not yet standardized into today’s algorithmic pathways. As tests multiplied and specialties hardened, so did the temptation to anchor on a pet theory and build an elaborate narrative around it. His maxim pushes back with a kind of austere humility: medicine is probabilistic, not literary.

The phrase “easy” also isn’t laziness; it’s discipline. Easy means likely, testable, and actionable. It’s an ethic of care disguised as a cognitive rule: don’t let a patient pay the price for your desire to be interesting. In the age of Dr. Google and boutique diagnostics, the line reads less like old-school advice and more like a needed cultural correction.