The Life of Sir William Osler, by Harvey Cushing.
Life and Confessions of a Psychologist, by G. Stanley Hall.
Sir William Osler occupied a unique position; he was the most widely known and best beloved physician in the world. He made an indelible impression on the teaching and practice of medicine in three countries—Canada, the United States and England. He lived the number of years allotted to man by the psalmist, and each succeeding year of his life he added to his mental stature by taking thought, and to his emotional profundity by doing deeds of kindliness.
He was the son of an Anglo-Saxon pioneer parson, Featherstone Lake Osler, and of Ellen Free Pickton, a Celt who went from Cornwall to the Province of Ontario in 1837. His spiritual parents were Hermes and Minerva, and he had three godfathers—a parson, Arthur Johnson; a physician, James Bovell, and a professor, Robert Palmer Howard—to them he dedicated the most widely read textbook on the practice of medicine ever written.
He had a genius for friendship that was nearly unique; he had a capacity for quick and accurate observation which is not vouchsafed to one man in a thousand; he had a prehensile mind to which synthesis and logic appealed; he had a liking and a capacity for work that resembled those of Theodore Roosevelt; he had an inborn understanding of humanity; and he loved his fellows. When they were ill, he added great tenderness to his love. He was playful, prankful and guileless, with the face of a sphinx and the expression of an ascetic. He was a scholar without pedantry, a scientist without pretension, a wit without venom, a humanist without scorn. Small wonder that he was the man without an enemy.
One of his most beloved friends and esteemed colleagues has written his biography and at the same time achieved one of the most difficult of all tasks: he has kept himself out of the book and refrained from eulogising the subject. There are many biographies of physicians that merit the designation “great”; among them, Henry Morley’s Life of Jerome Cardan, René Valléry-Radot’s Vie de Pasteur, Stephen Paget’s Life of Victor Horsley, Agnes Repplier’s Life of William White and to the list must be added Harvey Cushing’s Life of William Osler.
Osler did three great things for medicine: he conceived and effected bedside teaching; he demonstrated the value of history as a pedagogical agency and of culture as a humanising one, and he succeeded in making the medical world heed that cure meant prevention. He had but one fundamental dislike: chauvinism; one abiding disdain: insincerity; one supreme contempt: pretence. He could not abide a faker, unless he were feeble minded; then pity facilitated tolerance.
On his seventieth birthday his former pupils and intimate colleagues of this country sent to Oxford two memorial volumes made up of contributions to the science and art that he had fostered and developed. Replying to his fellow Regius professor of medicine in Cambridge, who made the presentation, he said:
SIR WILLIAM OSLER
Reprinted from “The Annals of Medical History”