William Osler
Photo: Unknown author Unknown author, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons21

William Osler

Canadian physician and co-founder of Johns Hopkins Hospital (1849–1919)

Sir William Osler, 1st Baronet (July 12, 1849 – December 29, 1919) was a Canadian physician and one of the "Big Four" founding professors of Johns Hopkins Hospital. Osler created the first residency program for specialty training of physicians.2

From Wikipedia’s article on William Osler (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Born Jul 12, 1849, died Dec 29, 1919.1

About

He has frequently been described as the Father of Modern Medicine and one of the "greatest diagnosticians ever to wield a stethoscope". In addition to being a physician he was a bibliophile, historian, author, and renowned practical joker. He was passionate about medical libraries and medical history, having founded the History of Medicine Society (formally "section"), at the Royal Society of Medicine, London. He was also instrumental in founding the Medical Library Association of Great Britain and Ireland, and the (North American) Association of Medical Librarians (later the Medical Library Association) along with three other people, including Margaret Charlton, the medical librarian of his alma mater, McGill University. He left his own large history of medicine library to McGill, where it became the Osler Library.

From Wikipedia’s article on William Osler, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2

Companies

Early life and education

  • Date not recordedTrinity College3
  • Date not recordedMcGill Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences3

Early life

William Osler was born in Bond Head, Canada West (Ontario), on July 12, 1849, and raised after 1857 in Dundas, Ontario. He was named William after William of Orange, who won the Battle of the Boyne on July 12, 1690. Osler's mother, who was very religious, prayed that he would become a priest. Osler was educated at Trinity College School (then located in Weston, Ontario).

In 1867, Osler announced that he would follow his father's footsteps into the ministry and entered Trinity College of the University of Toronto, in the autumn. However, he became increasingly interested in medical science under the influence of James Bovell and the Rev. William Arthur Johnson, encouraging him to switch his career.

In 1868, Osler enrolled in the Toronto School of Medicine, a privately owned institution that was not part of the Medical Faculty of the University of Toronto. Osler lived with James Bovell for a time, and through Johnson, he was introduced to the writings of Sir Thomas Browne; his Religio Medici caused a deep impression on him.

Osler left the Toronto School of Medicine after being accepted into the MDCM program at the McGill University Faculty of Medicine in Montreal in 1870. Osler received his medical degree (MDCM) in 1872.

While studying at McGill, Osler lived on lower Saint Urbain Street, at a time when the medical school was on nearby Côté Street. While in Montreal, Osler, who was a practicing Anglican regularly attended the "free seat" Chapel of St. John the Evangelist which at the time was located on Dorchester Street (now René Lévesque Boulevard). Osler held the chapel's rector, Fr. Edmund Wood in high regard due to his care for the less fortunate. Osler had personal copies of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and Hymns Ancient and Modern, both of which are kept in the Osler Library of the History of Medicine at McGill. Osler and Fr. Wood would later on contribute to the installation of a memorial stained glass window in honour of Rev. Dr. William Wright, a professor of Materia medica at the McGill Faculty of Medicine and also a long time associate priest at the Church of St. John the Evangelist, which had since built a new church building on Ontario Street (now President Kennedy Avenue) and Saint Urbain, a few blocks north of the chapel's former location.

From Wikipedia’s article on William Osler (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Career

Occupation: writer, physician, professor.10

Following post-graduate training under Rudolf Virchow in Germany, Osler returned to the McGill University Faculty of Medicine as a professor in 1874. There he created the first formal journal club, showed interest in comparative pathology, and is considered the first to have taught veterinary pathology in North America as part of a broad understanding of disease pathogenesis. In 1884, he was appointed Chair of Clinical Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and in 1885, was one of the seven founding members of the Association of American Physicians, a society dedicated to "the advancement of scientific and practical medicine." When he left Philadelphia in 1889, his farewell address, "Aequanimitas", was about the imperturbability (calm amid storm) and equanimity (moderated emotion, tolerance) necessary for physicians.

In 1889, he became the first Physician-in-Chief of the new Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1893, Osler was instrumental in creating the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and became one of the school's first professors of medicine. Osler quickly enhanced his reputation as a clinician, humanitarian, and teacher. He presided over the rapidly expanding hospital's first year of operation, when it had 220 beds and 788 patients were seen for a total of over 15,000 days of treatment. Sixteen years later, when Osler left for Oxford, over 4,200 patients were seen for a total of nearly 110,000 days of treatment.

In 1905, he was appointed Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, a position 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 and was founding Senior Editor of its publication the Quarterly Journal of Medicine until his death.

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

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

The largest collection of Osler's letters and papers is at the Osler Library of McGill University in Montreal and a collection is also held at the United States National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.

From Wikipedia’s article on William Osler (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Personal life

  • BornJul 12, 1849, Bond Head11
  • DiedDec 29, 1919, Oxford12 13
  • CitizenshipCanada14
  • SpouseGrace Linzee Revere15

Family

William Osler's great-grandfather, Edward Osler, was variously described as either a merchant seaman or a pirate. One of William's uncles, Edward Osler (1798–1863), a medical officer in the Royal Navy, wrote the Life of Lord Exmouth and the poem The Voyage.

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.

As a teenager, Featherstone Osler was aboard HMS Sappho when it was nearly destroyed by Atlantic storms and remained adrift for weeks. Serving in the Navy, he was shipwrecked off Barbados. In 1837, Featherstone Osler retired from the Navy and emigrated to Canada, becoming a "saddle-bag minister" in rural Upper Canada. When Featherstone and his bride, Ellen Free Picton, arrived in Canada, they were nearly shipwrecked again on Egg Island in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Their children included William, Britton Bath Osler and Sir Edmund Boyd Osler.

Read more

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 penis captivus, on December 13, 1884. The letter was apparently a response to a report on the phenomenon of vaginismus reported three weeks previously in the Philadelphia Medical News by Osler's colleague Theophilus Parvin. Davis, a prolific writer of letters to medical societies, purported to be a retired U.S. Army surgeon living in Caughnawaga, Quebec (now Kahnawake), author of a fake paper on the obstetrical habits of Native American tribes that was intended as a joke on his rival, Dr. William A. Molson. The piece was never published in Osler's lifetime, nor was it intended to be published; Osler knew the content was outrageous, but he wanted to make a fool of Molson by getting the piece to the brink of publication in the Montreal Medical Journal, of which Molson was the editor. Osler would enhance Davis's myth by signing Davis's name to hotel registers and medical conference attendance lists; Davis was eventually reported drowned in the Lachine Rapids in 1884.

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 Oxford, during the Spanish flu epidemic, most likely of complications from undiagnosed bronchiectasis. His wife, Grace, lived another nine years but succumbed to a series of strokes. Sir William and Lady Osler's ashes now rest in a niche in the 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; Lt. Osler's grave is in the Dozinghem Military Cemetery in West Flanders, Belgium. 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. Lady Osler (Grace Revere) was born in Boston in 1854; her paternal great-grandfather was Paul Revere. 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. 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. 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. He was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1885.

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

From Wikipedia’s article on William Osler (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Awards

  • 1994Canadian Medical Hall of Fame16 18
  • 1920honorary doctorate from the University of Strasbourg16 17
  • 1913Silliman Memorial Lectures16
  • 1906Harveian Oration16
  • 1885Goulstonian Lectures16
  • Date not recordedFellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London16
  • Date not recordedFellow of the Royal Society16
  • Date not recordedPerson of National Historic Significance16
  • Date not recordedbaronet16

Sources

The numbers on this page point here. Each one links to the record it came from.

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21