Justice & Law Quote by William Osler

Osler is arguing for humility disguised as a rule: the body won’t sit still long enough to be mastered by any one system. The line opens with a sweeping maxim, “Variability is the law of life,” then immediately grounds it in something any clinician can picture - faces. It’s a rhetorical sleight of hand that turns individuality from a sentimental idea into a clinical fact. If you’d never confuse two strangers on the street, why pretend two patients can be managed as interchangeable “cases”?

The subtext is a quiet rebellion against the medicine of his era, when diagnostic categories and tidy theories often outran reliable treatments. Late-19th-century scientific medicine was professionalizing fast: laboratories, bacteriology, standardized teaching. Osler helped build that modern infrastructure, yet he’s warning that the new confidence can become its own superstition. “Abnormal conditions which we know as disease” carries a pointed irony: disease isn’t a fixed entity so much as a label for messy deviations. The phrase “which we know as” concedes that medical knowledge is provisional, filtered through what the profession is prepared to recognize.

His intent isn’t to romanticize uniqueness; it’s to discipline the clinician’s gaze. Variability isn’t an excuse for guesswork, but a demand for closer observation, for adapting rather than reciting. Read now, it lands as an early manifesto for what we’d call personalized medicine - minus the tech hype. Osler’s version is more bracing: the patient is the evidence, and certainty is always on probation.