TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY ®  •  TODAYINSCI ®
Celebrating 24 Years on the Web
Find science on or your birthday

Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz
Who said: “Genius is two percent inspiration, ninety-eight percent perspiration.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Dictionary of Science Quotations > Scientist Names Index W > Sir Samuel Wilks Quotes

Thumbnail of Sir Samuel Wilks (source)
Sir Samuel Wilks
(2 Jun 1824 - 8 Nov 1911)

English physician who was a physician at Guy's Hospital.


Science Quotes by Sir Samuel Wilks (3 quotes)

Being also in accord with Goethe that discoveries are made by the age and not by the individual, I should consider the instances to be exceedingly rare of men who can be said to be living before their age, and to be the repository of knowledge quite foreign to the thought of the time. The rule is that a number of persons are employed at a particular piece of work, but one being a few steps in advance of the others is able to crown the edifice with his name, or, having the ability to generalise already known facts, may become in time to be regarded as their originator. Therefore it is that one name is remembered whilst those of coequals have long been buried in obscurity.
— Sir Samuel Wilks
In Historical Notes on Bright's Disease, Addison's Disease, and Hodgkin's Disease', Guy's Hospital Reports (1877), 22, 259-260.
Science quotes on:  |  Ability (162)  |  Advance (298)  |  Age (509)  |  Already (226)  |  Become (821)  |  Being (1276)  |  Coequal (2)  |  Consider (428)  |  Crown (39)  |  Discovery (837)  |  Edifice (26)  |  Employ (115)  |  Exceedingly (28)  |  Fact (1257)  |  Facts (553)  |  Foreign (45)  |  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (150)  |  Individual (420)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Known (453)  |  Living (492)  |  Long (778)  |  Name (359)  |  Number (710)  |  Obscurity (28)  |  Originator (7)  |  Other (2233)  |  Person (366)  |  Rare (94)  |  Regard (312)  |  Remember (189)  |  Repository (5)  |  Rule (307)  |  Step (234)  |  Thought (995)  |  Time (1911)  |  Work (1402)

Perhaps H. G. Wells was right when he said ‘statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write’!
— Sir Samuel Wilks
From address (28 Dec 1950) to the 110th Annual Meeting of the American Statistical Association in Chicago, when retiring as president of the association. Published in 'Undergraduate Statistical Education', Journal of the American Statistical Association (Mar 1951), 46, No. 253, 5. Note that Wilks is giving his own short paraphrase, and not a verbatim quote from H.G. Wells. Wilks' paraphrase has taken on a life of its own as a quote commonly seen attributed to H.G. Wells, without mention of Wilks, even though the paraphrase wording comes from Wilks’ presidential address. The origin quote comes from H.G. Wells, Mankind in the Making (1903), 204. See the full origin quote on this site Herbert George (H.G.) Wells Quotations page, beginning: “The new mathematics is a sort of supplement to language…”. In fact, Wells referred only to “mathematical analysis” such as “averages and maxima and minima” — and did not specify (more complex) “statistics” at all!
Science quotes on:  |  Ability (162)  |  Citizenship (9)  |  Efficient (34)  |  Mathematical Analysis (23)  |  Necessary (370)  |  Read (308)  |  Right (473)  |  Statistics (170)  |  Think (1122)  |  Herbert George (H.G.) Wells (41)  |  Write (250)

We profess to teach the principles and practice of medicine, or, in other words, the science and art of medicine. Science is knowledge reduced to principles; art is knowledge reduced to practice. The knowing and doing, however, are distinct. ... Your knowledge, therefore, is useless unless you cultivate the art of healing. Unfortunately, the scientific man very often has the least amount of art, and he is totally unsuccessful in practice; and, on the other hand, there may be much art based on an infinitesimal amount of knowledge, and yet it is sufficient to make its cultivator eminent.
— Sir Samuel Wilks
From H.G. Sutton, Abstract of Lecture delivered at Guy's Hospital by Samuel Wilks, 'Introductory to Part of a Course on the Theory and Practice of Medicine', The Lancet (24 Mar 1866), 1, 308
Science quotes on:  |  Amount (153)  |  Art (680)  |  Cultivation (36)  |  Distinct (98)  |  Distinction (72)  |  Doing (277)  |  Eminence (25)  |  Healing (28)  |  Infinitesimal (30)  |  Knowing (137)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Man (2252)  |  Medicine (392)  |  Other (2233)  |  Practice (212)  |  Principle (530)  |  Profess (21)  |  Profession (108)  |  Science And Art (195)  |  Scientific (955)  |  Scientist (881)  |  Success (327)  |  Sufficiency (16)  |  Sufficient (133)  |  Teach (299)  |  Unfortunately (40)  |  Uselessness (22)  |  Word (650)


See also:
  • 2 Jun - short biography, births, deaths and events on date of Wilks's birth.

Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
Sitewide search within all Today In Science History pages:
Visit our Science and Scientist Quotations index for more Science Quotes from archaeologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, inventors and inventions, mathematicians, physicists, pioneers in medicine, science events and technology.

Names index: | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

Categories index: | 1 | 2 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
Thank you for sharing.
- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


by Ian Ellis
who invites your feedback
Thank you for sharing.
Today in Science History
Sign up for Newsletter
with quiz, quotes and more.