A Fact In Itself Is

When A Physician Is Called To A Patient, He Should Decide On The Diagnosis, Then The Prognosis, And Then The Treatment. ... Physicians Must Know The Evolution Of The Disease, Its Duration And Gravity In Order To Predict Its Course And Outcome. Here Statistics Intervene To Guide Physicians, By Teaching Them The Proportion Of Mortal Cases, And If Observation Has Also Shown That The Successful And Unsuccessful Cases Can Be Recognized By Certain Signs, Then The Prognosis Is More Certain.

The Constancy Of The Internal Environment Is The Condition For Free And Independent Life: The Mechanism That Makes It Possible Is That Which Assured The Maintenance, With The Internal Environment, Of All The Conditions Necessary For The Life Of The Elements.

I Do Not ... Reject The Use Of Statistics In Medicine, But I Condemn Not Trying To Get Beyond Them And Believing In Statistics As The Foundation Of Medical Science. ... Statistics ... Apply Only To Cases In Which The Cause Of The Facts Observed Is Still [uncertain Or] Indeterminate. ... There Will Always Be Some Indeterminism ... In All The Sciences, And More In Medicine Than In Any Other. But Man's Intellectual Conquest Consists In Lessening And Driving Back Indeterminism In Proportion As He Gains Ground For Determinism By The Help Of The Experimental Method.

[those] Who Have An Excessive Faith In Their Theories Or In Their Ideas Are Not Only Poorly Disposed To Make Discoveries, But They Also Make Very Poor Observations.

We Must Remain, In A Word, In An Intellectual Disposition Which Seems Paradoxical, But Which, In My Opinion, Represents The True Mind Of The Investigator. We Must Have A Robust Faith And Yet Not Believe.