Wit & Attitude Quote by William Osler

Progress has a dirty secret: it runs on yesterday’s certainties becoming tomorrow’s punchlines. Osler, a physician who helped professionalize modern medicine, isn’t just tossing off a clever paradox. He’s warning his own field against the seductive comfort of consensus. In late-19th-century medicine, “philosophy” often meant grand theories that sounded elegant in lecture halls and failed in wards. Osler watched practices migrate from tradition and authority toward observation, lab work, and clinical humility. His line is a preemptive strike against medical dogma dressed up as permanence.

The genius is in the double reversal. First, he punctures the arrogance of any age that imagines it has arrived at the final answer: today’s philosophy is already scheduled to be tomorrow’s absurdity. Then he complicates the smugness of the future: yesterday’s “foolishness” can be rehabilitated as “wisdom” once evidence, tools, or framing catch up. That second clause matters. It’s not a simple march from ignorance to enlightenment; it’s a reminder that ideas can be premature rather than wrong, and that discarding the past wholesale is its own kind of provincialism.

Osler’s subtext is ethical as much as intellectual. If your knowledge has an expiration date, you owe patients (and the public) a posture of revision: curiosity over certainty, skepticism over fashion, and a willingness to be corrected without treating correction as humiliation. In an era of confident experts and fast-cycling “breakthroughs,” the quote lands as both humility and method.