Osler: Reading and General practitioner

It is astonishing with how little reading a doctor can practise medicine, but it is not astonishing how badly he may do it.

Self-centered, self-taught, he leads a solitary life, and unless his every-day experience is controlled by careful reading, or by the attrition of a medical society it soon ceases to be of the slightest value and becomes a mere accretion of isolated facts without correlation.

Books and Men in Aequanimitas 210-211.