William Osler

William Osler MDCM)
Known for	co-founding physician of Johns Hopkins Hospital
Spouse	Grace Revere Osler
Children	2 sons
Scientific career
Fields	Physician, pathologist, internist, educator, bibliophile, author and historian
Institutions	McGill University Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Johns Hopkins Hospital University of Pennsylvania University of Oxford
Signature

Sir William Osler, 1st Baronet,

William Osler's father, the Reverend Featherstone Lake Osler (1805–1895), the son of a shipowner at Falmouth, Cornwall, was a former lieutenant in the Royal Navy who served on HMS Victory. In 1831, Featherstone Osler was invited to serve on HMS Beagle as the science officer for Charles Darwin's historic voyage to the Galápagos Islands, but he turned it down because his father was dying. In 1833, Featherstone Osler announced that he wanted to become a minister of the Church of England.^[7]

As a teenager, Featherstone Osler was aboard

In 1889, he became the first Physician-in-Chief of the new

In 1905, he was appointed to the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, which he held until his death. He was also a Student (fellow) of Christ Church, Oxford.

In the UK, he initiated the founding in 1907 of the Association of Physicians

In 1911, he founded the Postgraduate Medical Association and was its first President.[19] The same year, Osler was named a baronet in the Coronation Honours List for his contributions to the field of medicine.^[20]

In January 1919 he was appointed President of the Fellowship of Medicine ^[21] and was in October appointed founding President of the merged Fellowship of Medicine and Postgraduate Medical Association,^[22] which became the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine.

The largest collection of Osler's letters and papers is at the

Perhaps Osler's greatest influence on medicine was to insist that students learn from seeing and talking to patients and the establishment of the medical residency. The latter idea spread across the English-speaking world and remains in place today in most teaching hospitals. Through this system, physicians in training make up much of a teaching hospital's medical staff. The success of his residency system depended, in large part, on its pyramidal structure with many interns, fewer assistant residents and a single chief resident, who originally occupied that position for years. While at Hopkins, Osler established the full-time, sleep-in residency system whereby staff physicians lived in the administration building of the hospital. As established, the residency was open-ended, and long tenure was the rule. Physicians spent as long as seven or eight years as residents, during which time they led a restricted, almost monastic life.

He wrote in an essay "Books and Men" that "He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all."^[25] His best-known saying was "Listen to your patient, he is telling you the diagnosis", which emphasises the importance of taking a good history.^[2]

The contribution to medical education of which he was proudest was his idea of clinical clerkship – having third- and fourth-year students work with patients on the wards. He pioneered the practice of bedside teaching, making rounds with a handful of students, demonstrating what one student referred to as his method of "incomparably thorough physical examination." Soon after arriving in Baltimore, Osler insisted that his medical students attend at bedside early in their training. By their third year they were taking patient histories, performing physicals and doing lab tests examining secretions, blood and excreta.

He reduced the role of

Osler was a prolific author and a great collector of books and other material relevant to the history of medicine. He willed his library to the Faculty of Medicine of McGill University where it now forms the nucleus of McGill University's Osler Library of the History of Medicine.^[26] Osler was a strong supporter of libraries and served on the library committees at most of the universities at which he taught and was a member of the Board of Curators of the Bodleian Library in Oxford. He was instrumental in founding the Medical Library Association in North America, alongside employee and mentee Marcia Croker Noyes,^[27] and served as its second president from 1901 to 1904. In Britain he was the first (and only) president of the Medical Library Association of Great Britain and Ireland^[28] and also a president of the Bibliographical Society of London (1913).^[29]

Osler was a prolific author and public speaker and his public speaking and writing were both done in a clear, lucid style. His most famous work,

Osler said Canada should be a "white man's country" in a 1914 speech given around the time of the Komagata Maru incident involving immigration from India.^[34][35] Osler wrote “I hate Latin Americans” in a letter to Henry Vining Ogden.^[36][37] Under the pseudonym "Egerton Yorrick Davis", Osler mocked Indigenous people: “Every primitive tribe retains some vile animal habit not yet eliminated in the upward march of the race.” ^[38] Uncovering this historical context, the journalists David Bruser and Markus Grill and the archivist Nils Seethaler reconstruct the shipment of several indigenous skulls by Osler from Canada to Germany, which were (previously unknown) in the custody of the State Museums of Berlin.^[39]

Gerontology

Osler is well known in the field of gerontology for the speech he gave when leaving Hopkins to become the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford. "The Fixed Period", given on February 22, 1905, included some controversial words about old age. Osler, who had a well-developed humorous side to his character, was in his mid-fifties when he gave the speech and in it he mentioned Anthony Trollope's The Fixed Period (1882), which envisaged a college where men retired at 67 and after being given a year to settle their affairs, would be "peacefully extinguished by chloroform". He claimed that, "the effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty" and it was downhill from then on.^[40] Osler's speech was covered by the popular press which headlined their reports with "Osler recommends chloroform at sixty".^[41] The concept of mandatory euthanasia for humans after a "fixed period" (often 60 years) became a recurring theme in 20th century science fiction—for example, Isaac Asimov's 1950 novel Pebble in the Sky and Half a Life (Star Trek: The Next Generation). In the 3rd edition of his Textbook, he also coined the description of pneumonia as "the friend of the aged" since it allowed elderly individuals a quick, comparatively painless death: "Taken off by it in an acute, short, not often painful illness, the old man escapes those "cold gradations of decay" so distressing to himself and his friends."^[42] Coincidentally, Osler himself died of pneumonia.

Personal life and family

An inveterate prankster, he wrote several humorous pieces under the pseudonym "Egerton Yorrick Davis", even fooling the editors of the Philadelphia Medical News into publishing a report on the extremely rare phenomenon of

Throughout his life, Osler was a great admirer of the 17th century physician and philosopher Sir Thomas Browne.

He died at the age of 70, on December 29, 1919, in

Osler Library at McGill University. They had two sons, one of whom died shortly after birth. The other, Edward Revere Osler, was mortally wounded in combat in World War I at the age of 21, during the 3rd battle of Ypres (also known as the battle of Passchendaele). At the time of his death in August 1917, he was a second lieutenant in the (British) Royal Field Artillery;^[46] Lt. Osler's grave is in the Dozinghem Military Cemetery in West Flanders, Belgium.^[47] According to one biographer, Osler was emotionally crushed by the loss; he was particularly anguished by the fact that his influence had been used to procure a military commission for his son, who had mediocre eyesight.^[48] Lady Osler (Grace Revere) was born in Boston in 1854; her paternal great-grandfather was Paul Revere.^[49] In 1876, she married Samuel W. Gross, chairman of surgery at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia and son of Dr. Samuel D. Gross

. Gross died in 1889 and in 1892 she married William Osler who was then professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University.

Osler was a founding donor of the American Anthropometric Society, a group of academics who pledged to donate their brains for scientific study.^[50] His brain was donated to the American Anthropometric Society after his death and is currently stored at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. A study of his brain, conducted in 1927, concluded that there were differences between the brains of the highly intelligent and normal brains.^[51] In April 1987 it was taken to the Mütter Museum, on 22nd Street near Chestnut in Philadelphia where it was displayed during the annual meeting of the American Osler Society.^[52][53] He was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1885.^[54]

In 1925, a biography of William Osler was written by Harvey Cushing,^[55] who received the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for the work. A later biography by Michael Bliss was published in 1999.^[48] In 1994 Osler was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame.^[56]

Eponyms

Osler lent his name to a number of diseases, signs and symptoms, as well as to a number of buildings that have been named for him.^[57][58]

Conditions

• Osler's sign is an artificially high systolic blood pressure reading due to the calcification of atherosclerotic arteries
• Osler's nodes are raised tender nodules on the pulps of fingertips or toes, suggestive of subacute bacterial endocarditis. Osler described them as "ephemeral spots of a painful nodular erythema, chiefly in the skin of the hands and feet." Osler nodes are usually painful, as opposed to Janeway lesions which are due to emboli and are painless.
• Osler–Weber–Rendu disease (also known as hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia) is a syndrome of multiple vascular
  malformations on the skin, in the nasal and oral mucosa, in the lungs and elsewhere.
• Osler–Vaquez disease
  (also known as Polycythemia vera)
• Osler–Libman–Sacks syndrome is an atypical, verrucous, nonbacterial, valvular and mural endocarditis. Final stage of systemic lupus erythematosus
  .
• Osler's manoeuvre: in
  systolic pressure; thus they are considered to have "Osler's sign."^{[citation needed}
  ]
• Osler's rule: States that a neurological defect has to be related to a specific lesion, in contrast to Hickam's dictum, which states that the neurological defect can be due to several lesions.^{[citation needed]}
• Osler's syndrome is a syndrome of recurrent episodes of colic pain, with typical radiation to back, cold shiverings and fever; due to the presence in Vater's diverticulum of a free-moving gallstone which is larger than the orifice.^{[citation needed]}
• Osler's triad (also known as Austrian Syndrome): association of pneumonia, endocarditis, and meningitis.^[59][60]
• Sphryanura osleri is a
  trematode worm found in the gills of a newt.^{[citation needed}
  ]
• Oslerus osleri is a metastrongyloid nematode lungworm parasite of wild and domestic canids. Osler discovered the parasite while teaching comparative pathology at McGill.^{[citation needed]}

Buildings

• Osler Building at The Johns Hopkins Hospital currently The Johns Hopkins Hospital Human Resources. Until 2012 the Medical Intensive Care Unit (MICU) was located on the 7th floor
• Vancouver, British Columbia
• Ecole Sir William Osler School – Elementary School Winnipeg, Manitoba
• Sir William Osler Elementary School – HWDSB Elementary School in Dundas, Ontario
• Sir William Osler High School,
  Agincourt area of Scarborough in what is now Toronto
  , Ontario
• Sir William Osler Public School
  Bradford West Gwillimbury, Ontario
  and 3 kilometres away from his birthplace, Bond Head, Ontario
• Osler Library of the History of Medicine, McGill University, Montreal. Osler left his 8000 volume collection of books on the history of medicine to his alma mater. The library now holds over 100,000 volumes and is Canada's de facto 'national library of the history of medicine'
• Promenade Sir-William-Osler (Formerly the upper section of rue Drummond.) adjacent to the campus of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec and leading to the McIntyre Medical Sciences Building, which houses the Osler Library of the History of Medicine
• Brampton, Ontario
• Osler House is the student mess for clinical medical students of
  Oxford University and is found at the John Radcliffe Hospital
  in Oxford
• Osler Ward is the Respiratory Medicine ward of the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.
• Osler House is also the name of the old Observer's House, next to the
  Grade I listed building^[63]
• Osler House is one of the two undergraduate hostels of the
  JIPMER medical school in Puducherry
  , India
• Osler Textbook Room 1999 at Johns Hopkins Hospital^[64] in the room in the Billings Building where Osler wrote "Principles and Practice of Medicine". It houses a collection of Osler memorabilia
• Osler Center for Clinical Excellence 2002^[65] devoted to teaching "the basic elements of a sound doctor patient relationship"
• Osler Hall is Main Hall of "Med Chi" or Medical and Chirurgical Faculty, the Maryland State Medical Society,^[66] located on Cathedral Street in Baltimore. The Med Chi House of Delegates meets and deliberates in Osler Hall wherein hang numerous portraits of famous Maryland physicians including a large portrait of Osler
• Osler House (a medical residence) in Townsville, Queensland, Australia is believed to be named after him ^[67]
• Osler House, Osler's childhood home in Dundas, Ontario.

Awards

• American Association for the History of medicine, William Osler Medal.^[68][69]
• Osler Library, McGill University. Pam and Rolando Del Maestro William Osler Medical Students Essay Awards.^[70]
• Osler Lecture at the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries.^[71]
• Student Award in Oslerian Medicine^[72]

References

1. ^ "Johns Hopkins Medicine: The Founding Physicians". Johns Hopkins Hospital. Retrieved May 30, 2014.
2. ^ ^{a b} Tuteur, Amy (November 19, 2008). "Listen to your patient". The Skeptical OB. Archived from the original on March 19, 2012. Retrieved April 9, 2012.
3. ISBN 978-1400078790
   .
4. OCLC 47271565
   .
5. PMID 10530306
   .
6. ^ Osler, Edward (1798–1863). The Voyage: a poem, written at sea, and in the West Indies, and illustrated by papers on natural history. London: Longman, 1830.
7. OCLC 41439631
   .
8. OCLC 41439631
   .
9. ^ Joseph Hanaway, '(1996). McGill Medicine: The First Half Century, 1829–1885. McGill-Queen's Press. p. 179
10. OCLC 41439631
    .
11. ISBN 9781934465004
12. ^ Osler, William (2008). edited by Mark E. Silverman, T. J. Murray, Charles S. Bryan. The Quotable Osler. ACP Press. p. 284
13. OCLC 41439631
    .
14. ^ AEQUANIMITAS. Medicalarchives.jhmi.edu. Retrieved on May 30, 2014.
15. PMC 2078638
    .
16. ^ Fisher, Kimberly A. "History of The Johns Hopkins Hospital". Retrieved February 19, 2017.
17. ^ "Our History". Association of Physicians of Great Britain and Ireland. Archived from the original on August 8, 2022. Retrieved July 7, 2021.
18. ^ Anon (1936). "Early history of the Association of Physicians of Great Britain and Ireland and of the Quarterly Journal of Medicine". Quarterly Journal of Medicine. 5: 536–40.
19. PMC 2399241
    .
20. doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(01)58188-x
    . Sir William Osler, Regius professor of medicine in the University of Oxford, who is famous throughout two continents, has enriched the literature of medicine with many works of high scientific and literary value.
21. ^ Osler appointed President of the Inter-Allied Fellowship of Medicine. The Times. 14th January 1919.
22. ISBN 1-85775-789-0
23. ^ "Sir William Osler Press Clippings 1905–1920". National Library of Medicine.
24. ^ "Sir William Osler Collection, P100". McGill Archival Collections Catalogue. Retrieved November 18, 2018.
25. ^ "Aequanimitas – Books and Men". www.medicalarchives.jhmi.edu.
26. ^ Bibliotheca Osleriana. Mqup.mcgill.ca. Retrieved on May 30, 2014.
27. PMID 4619344
    .
28. PMID 15606885
    .
29. ^ "The Bibliographical Society – Past Presidents". Bibsoc.org.uk. November 18, 2008. Archived from the original on August 4, 2009. Retrieved January 24, 2011.
30. ^ (See Osler Library Studies in the History of Medicine vol. 8.)
31. ISBN 0-7717-0615-4
    .
32. ^ Bloodletting – UCLA Biomedical Library History and Special Collections for the Sciences Archived March 13, 2012, at the Wayback Machine. Library.ucla.edu. Retrieved on May 30, 2014.
33. S2CID 41337692
    .
34. PMID 33168766
    .
35. PMID 9176421
    .
36. ISBN 9780961707002
    .
37. ^ Venugopal, Raghu (June 1996). "Reading between the lines: a glimpse of the Cushing files and The Life of Sir William Osler" (PDF). Osler Library Newsletter. 82: 1–4.
38. ISBN 9780771705489
    .
39. ^ David Bruser/Markus Grill: The untold story of four Indigenous skulls given away by one of Canada’s most famous doctors, and the quest to bring them home. Toronto Star, 17.12.20.
40. PMID 11570935
    .
41. ^ For details, see Charles G. Roland: "What Did Trollope Actually Write? The Fixed Period and 'The Fixed Period'" (1995) [1].
42. ^ Osler, William (1899). The principles and practice of medicine: designed for the use of practitioners and students of medicine. New York: Appleton and Company. p. 109.
43. OCLC 48551127
    . A collection of writings by the fictitious surgical character created by Osler, E. Y. Davis
44. ^ ^{a b} "Egerton Y. Davis", Chris Nickson, Life in the Fastlane, November 16, 2008
45. PMID 12949207
    .
46. ^ Starling, Peter. "The Life and Death of Edward Revere Osler". Western Front Association. Retrieved March 31, 2021.
47. PMID 12743923
    .
48. ^
    OCLC 41439631
    .
49. ISSN 0002-9955
    .
50. JSTOR 1005434
    . Retrieved January 3, 2024.
51. ^ Avery, Ron. "Philadelphia Oddities: Wistar Brain Collection". www.ushistory.org. Indepedence Hall Association. Retrieved December 31, 2023.
52. ^ "They Put Their Brains To Work William Osler, Joseph Leidy, Edward Drinker Cope And William Pepper Were Among The Greatest Brains In Turn -of-the-century Philadelphia. And They Still Are". Articles.philly.com (April 3, 1991). Retrieved on May 30, 2014.
53. ^ Osler Library Newsletter No. 60 February 1989 Archived July 5, 2013, at the Wayback Machine. mcgill.ca
54. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved May 21, 2021.
55. PMID 16015960
    .
56. ^ "Sir William Osler". Canadian Medical Hall of Fame. Archived from the original on May 26, 2011. Retrieved March 24, 2010.
57. ^ "William Osler and his Gulstonian Lectures on malignant endocarditis". ResearchGate. Retrieved February 18, 2019.
58. ^ "11 Facts About Sir William Osler". Stanford Medicine 25. Retrieved February 18, 2019.
59. PMID 14600140
    .
60. PMID 13410159
    .
61. ^ "Sir William Osler High School – Welcome to Sir William Osler High School". Tdsb.on.ca. June 10, 2010. Retrieved January 24, 2011.
62. ^ SWO.scdsb.on.ca. SWO.scdsb.on.ca (May 4, 2014). Retrieved on May 30, 2014.
63. ^ Historic England. "Osler House (1369464)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved February 14, 2017.
64. ^ The Osler Textbook Room. Medicalarchives.jhmi.edu. Retrieved on May 30, 2014.
65. ^ HopkinsBayview.org. (June 24, 2011). Retrieved on May 30, 2014.
66. ^ Medchi.org. Medchi.org (April 8, 2014). Retrieved on May 30, 2014.
67. ^ "Osler House (entry 600931)". Queensland Heritage Register. Queensland Heritage Council. Retrieved August 1, 2014.
68. ^ "William Osler Medal | American Association for the History of Medicine". www.histmed.org. Retrieved July 28, 2017.
69. ^ "Competitions | Pritzker School of Medicine | The University of Chicago". pritzker.uchicago.edu. Retrieved July 28, 2017.
70. ^ "Pam and Rolando Del Maestro William Osler Medical Students Essay Awards | McGill Library - McGill University". www.mcgill.ca. Retrieved July 28, 2017.
71. ^ "Osler Lecture". www.apothecaries.org.
72. ^ "Student Award in Oslerian Medicine | UTMB Health | UTMB.edu". www.utmb.edu. Archived from the original on July 28, 2017. Retrieved July 28, 2017.

Bibliography

Library resources about
William Osler

---

• Resources in your library

By William Osler

• Resources in your library

• Celebrating the Contributions of William Osler. Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives 1999. Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.
• Famous Canadian Physicians: Sir William Osler at Library and Archives Canada.
• Osler, William (1969) [1929]. Francis, William W; Hill, Reginald H; Malloch, Archibald (eds.). Bibliotheca Osleriana: A Catalogue of Books Illustrating the History of Medicine and Science (Revised ed.). Montreal:
  OCLC 75916. The Introduction and other editorial matter is freely available on-line
  .
• Osler, William; Silverman, Mark E; Murray, T J; Bryan, Charles S (2002). The Quotable Osler. Philadelphia:
  OCLC 50477294
  .
• "Sir WILLIAM OSLER Bt., M.D., F.R.S., F.R.C.P".
  PMC 2337064
  .

External links

Archives at
Location Osler Library of the History of Medicine Identifiers P100 Source Sir William Osler Collection
How to use archival material

Wikiquote has quotations related to William Osler.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to William Osler.

• Sir William Osler in the
  US National Library of Medicine
  's Profiles in Science
• Richard L. Golden;
  ISBN 978-0-930405-00-7
  .
• Sir William Osler Collection at the Osler Library of the History of Medicine, McGill University
• Harvey Cushing Fonds at the Osler Library of the History of Medicine contains letters by Osler compiled during the writing of Cushing's biography of Osler.
• Roland, Charles G. (1998). "Osler, Sir William". In Cook, Ramsay; Hamelin, Jean (eds.). Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Vol. XIV (1911–1920) (online ed.). University of Toronto Press.
• William Osler Photo Collection, Osler Library of the History of Medicine
• Sir William Osler – The Canadian Encyclopedia
• Osler Library, brief biography of William Osler
• Works by William Osler at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about William Osler at Internet Archive
• Works by William Osler at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Essays by William Osler at Quotidiana.org
• Aequanimitas from the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the
  Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions
  .
• Biography on WhoNamedIt.com
• Biography from Osler House, Oxford, focusing on his Oxford years
• Osler House – Dundas – B&B, Meetings, Celebrations, Receptions, Retreats Archived May 28, 2022, at the Wayback Machine
• Ontario Plaques — Sir William Osler
• [2] at 13
  Oxford University (information from Green Templeton College, Oxford
  )
• Osler House Club, Oxford University
• The American Osler Society
• The Osler Club of London
• Osler biography, chronology, bibliography & resources (from Johns Hopkins)
• Systemofmedicine.com, Oslerian medical education resource Archived July 17, 2021, at the Wayback Machine
• William Osler Health Centre
• PMID 19753296; Osler's bedside table Library for Medical Students{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link
  )

Baronetage of the United Kingdom
New creation	Baronet (of Norham Gardens) 1911–1919	Extinct