“Among multiple acknowledgment I can lift one hand to heaven that I was born of honest parents, that modesty, humility, patience and veracity lay in the same egg, and came into the world with me. To have had a happy home in which unselfishness reigned, parents whose self-sacrifice remains a blessed memory, brothers and sisters helpful far beyond the usual measure—all these make a picture delightful to look back upon. Then to have had the benediction of friendship follow one like a shadow, to have always had the sense of comradeship in work, without the petty pinpricks of jealousies and controversies, to be able to rehearse in the sessions of sweet, silent thought the experiences of long years without a single bitter memory—to have and to do all this fills the heart with gratitude. That three transplantations have been borne successfully is a witness to the brotherly care with which you have tended me. Loving our profession, and believing ardently in its future, I have been content to live in and for it. A moving ambition to become a good teacher and a sound clinician was fostered by opportunities of an exceptional character, and any success I may have attained must be attributed in large part to the unceasing kindness of colleagues and to a long series of devoted pupils whose success in life is my special pride.”
There is the man, modest, grateful, appreciative. He attributes his material success to what others have done for him; his spiritual to his inheritancy. Had he added that, early in life, he had a vision and had striven heroically and worked laboriously to make it concrete for the benefit of mankind, and that extraordinary success had attended his efforts, he would have explained William Osler and his career.
What more need be said of his parents? They struggled successfully with the virgin soil in a primitive civilisation; the father ornamented his profession, and the mother fulfilled bounteously her destiny; she mothered eight children, four of whom became famous. The youngest, the subject of this biography, was in nowise remarkable as a child or boy:
“I started in life with just an ordinary everyday stock of brains. In my schooldays I was much more bent upon mischief than upon books, but as soon as I got interested in medicine I had only a single idea: to do the day’s work that was before me just as faithfully and honestly and energetically as was in my power.”
And this he did to the day of his death.
He was steered into medicine by a strange mixture of scientific and pietistic ardour, James Bovell, and he studied and graduated at McGill Medical School, then a proprietary institution at the head of which was R. Palmer Howard, who by possessions and conduct influenced Osler’s life, for he said of him thirty-five years later: “I have never known one in whom was more happily combined a stern sense of duty with the mental freshness of youth.”
Osler went abroad and while increasing his knowledge of medicine laid the foundation of friendships and intimacies which years later, after he had become a famous teacher, facilitated a call to one of the most ornamental professorships in Great Britain. At twenty-eight he had a chair in his alma mater. In ten years he went to the top. Then began that series of calls to colleges and universities here and abroad which did not cease so long as he lived. He refused them all save those of the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins. In the former he stayed five years; in the latter fifteen. The temptation to respond favourably to the call from New York was very great, and greater still that from Edinburgh. But temptation for Osler was created to be resisted and there was a star that guided him as it guided the Wise Men of the East; he had but to follow it at night, and to be counselled during the day by the voice that once had counselled Socrates to reach his goal, viz., a true knowledge of himself and of his relations to his fellows, and, having reached it, to plant there his banner bearing the masterword in medicine: work. And he worked industriously, honestly, patiently, persistently.
Then came the call to Oxford. He had been in the harness actively for thirty years and the load had begun to drag; the burdens that he had not only willingly borne, but sought, had begun to bend him, and the unfinished literary material of many years clamoured for academic leisure and favourable environment. Oxford was the place and Osler was the very man! Going for good meant farewells, and out of one of them flowed a stream of notoriety which, for a time, threatened to drown him. He took leave of his students, colleagues and trustees in an address in which he discussed many problems of university life; particularly the danger of staying too long in one place, and the danger of not thrusting opportunities and responsibilities upon young men—and at this point he inadvertently remarked that he was not sure whether it was Anthony Trollope who suggested that there should be a college into which men of sixty retired for a year’s contemplation before a peaceful departure by chloroform, but there was much to be said in favour of it. The journalese rendering of this was “Osler recommends chloroform at sixty.” The storm gathered during the night. It broke in the East the following morning and by the evening it had spread throughout the country.
Every man and woman above sixty, or approaching it, would seem to have been affronted. Following the acrimonious discussions of the newspapers and the caustic cartoons, came the studied magazine articles proving that Enoch not only begot Methuselah after he was sixty, but walked with God; that Edison was in the heyday of his inventive activity; that Ford would practicalise flying after the chloroform age and that Clémenceau would save the world for democracy, perhaps for socialism. For a short time it looked as if the man without an enemy had lost his distinction. Again, his inner voice counselled him wisely. He did not attempt to explain; he could not be persuaded to refute the alleged statement. He had said the truth, and the truth sufficed William Osler to the end.
Of the many extraordinary things in Dr. Cushing’s adequate and appealing biography, none is more arresting than the account given of the birth of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and the part that Osler unconsciously played in it through his textbook. A young man who had access to the ear and the purse of John D. Rockefeller read it and was appraised of the fertile field awaiting planting by preventive medicine. The crops that have been harvested have been enormous, but they are as naught compared with those about to be garnered. How little it is generally appreciated that the colossal success of the Panama Canal was due as much to Gorgas as to Bunau-Varilla, and that Osler mediated his appointment to the Commission, and still less is known of the leading part Osler played in decapitating the gorgon typhoid fever in this country thirty years ago.