William Osler

A microscope took him away from God. His father, Featherstone Osler, was a Royal Navy lieutenant who had been offered the science berth on HMS Beagle in 1831, turned it down because his own father was dying, and became instead a saddlebag minister in the Ontario bush. His mother prayed for a priest in the family, and in 1867 the son dutifully entered Trinity College, Toronto, for the ministry. Two men there, the physician James Bovell and the Reverend William Arthur Johnson, spent their free hours over pond water and specimens, and the divinity student began spending his there too. By 1868 he had left for the Toronto School of Medicine. McGill gave him his degree in 1872, and Berlin and Vienna finished him.

He came back to McGill at 25 as a professor who did his own autopsies and started the first journal club in North America. Pennsylvania took him in 1884. Then Baltimore: in 1889 he became the first physician-in-chief of the new Johns Hopkins Hospital, one of the four founding professors alongside Welch, Halsted and Kelly, and in 1893 he helped build the medical school. What he built there is the shape of American medical training still. He invented the residency, a graded ladder of resident house officers, and the clinical clerkship, which put third- and fourth-year students at the bedside taking histories and examining patients. His 1892 textbook, The Principles and Practice of Medicine, ran through new editions until 2001. Oxford made him Regius Professor in 1905 and the Crown made him a baronet in 1911.

On the day he left Hopkins, February 22, 1905, he gave a valedictory called The Fixed Period in which he described a novel where men retire at 67 and are then peacefully extinguished by chloroform, and argued that useful work is done between 25 and 40. He meant it as a joke with a hard edge. The papers ran it as Osler recommends chloroform at 60, and it followed him for the rest of his life. The private record is worse and not a joke. He said in 1914 that Canada should be a white man's country. He wrote in a letter that he hated Latin Americans. Under a pen name he described primitive tribes retaining vile animal habits, and researchers have since traced Indigenous skulls he shipped from Canada to Berlin.

His son Revere was killed at Passchendaele in August 1917, in a commission his father's influence had secured for a boy with bad eyesight, and Osler never got over it. He died at Oxford on December 29, 1919, of pneumonia, the illness he had called the friend of the aged. His ashes sit in a niche in the McGill library he stocked with 8,000 of his own books. His brain went to the American Anthropometric Society and is still at the Wistar Institute. Harvey Cushing, once his house officer, won a Pulitzer for the biography in 1926. The bedside teaching outlived all of it. So, lately, has the reckoning with the rest.

William Osler's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Aequanimitas speech
  His Pennsylvania farewell, on the composure a doctor owes a frightened room 1889
• The medical residency other
  Graded house-staff training, built at Johns Hopkins and copied everywhere 1889
• The Principles and Practice of Medicine book
  New editions kept appearing until 2001 1892
• Johns Hopkins School of Medicine company
  Founded with Welch, Halsted and Kelly 1893
• The clinical clerkship other
  Third- and fourth-year students moved out of the lecture hall and onto the wards 1893
• Osler Library of the History of Medicine building
  His own collection, opened at McGill a decade after his death 1929

• 1867 aged ~18 Enters Trinity College, Toronto, intending to become a clergyman He switched to medicine within a year under James Bovell and William Arthur Johnson.
• 1872 aged ~23 Takes the MDCM at McGill
• 1874 aged ~25 Returns to McGill as a professor at 25 He founded the first formal journal club in North America and taught veterinary pathology on the side.
• 1889 aged ~40 Becomes the first physician-in-chief of the Johns Hopkins Hospital The hospital opened with 220 beds. By the time he left it was treating 4,200 patients a year.
• 1892 aged ~43 Publishes The Principles and Practice of Medicine and marries Grace Revere
• February 22, 1905 aged 55 Gives The Fixed Period address on leaving Baltimore for Oxford The press reported it as a recommendation of chloroform at 60.
• 1911 aged ~62 Created a baronet in the Coronation Honours
• August 1917 aged 68 His son Revere dies of wounds at Passchendaele, aged 21 Osler had used his influence to get the commission for a young man with poor eyesight.
• December 29, 1919 aged 70 Dies at Oxford of pneumonia

• Harvey Cushing 1869–1939
  Surgeon who established modern neurosurgery as a specialized medical discipline. house officer and biographer
• William Stewart Halsted 1852–1922
  Established aseptic surgical technique and the American surgical residency training system. founding colleague at Johns Hopkins
• Paul Revere 1735–1818
  Silversmith and engraver whose Boston Massacre print and 1775 ride carried Revolutionary messaging. great-grandfather of his wife
• Walter Reed 1851–1902
  Army physician whose commission confirmed mosquito transmission of yellow fever and transformed disease control. trained in the system he built
• Elizabeth Blackwell 1821–1910
  First woman to receive a medical degree in the United States and a pioneer of women’s medical education. earlier fight for a place in medicine