William Osler

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The Four Doctors by John Singer Sargent, 1905, depicts the four physicians who founded Johns Hopkins Hospital. The original hangs in the William H. Welch Medical Library of Johns Hopkins University.
From left to right: William Henry Welch, William Stewart Halsted, Osler, Howard Kelly

Sir William Osler, 1st Baronet (July 12, 1849 – December 29, 1919) was a Canadian physician. He has been called one of the greatest icons of modern medicine, the Father of Modern Medicine, which is what he himself considered Avicenna to be.

1 Biography
2 Eponyms
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Biography

He was born in Bond Head, Canada West (now Ontario), raised largely in Dundas, Ontario. As he grew into manhood, his aim was the ministry and to that end he entered Trinity College, Toronto in the autumn of 1867. However, his chief interest proved to be medicine and, forsaking his original intention, he enrolled in the Toronto School of Medicine. This was a proprietary, or privately owned, institution (not to be confused with the Medical Faculty of the University of Toronto), which was then not active as a teaching body. After two years at the Toronto School of Medicine , Osler came to McGill University in Montreal where he obtained his medical degree (MDCM) in 1872.

Osler subsequently taught at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, where he had obtained his medical degree in 1872. It is here that he created the first formalized journal club. In 1884 he was appointed Chair of Clinical Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia; in 1889 he became the first chief of staff at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and in 1893 one of the first professors of medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. In 1905 he was appointed to the Regius Chair of Medicine at Oxford, which he held until his death. Osler was created a baronet in 1911 for his great contributions to the field of medicine.

Osler was a prolific author and a great collector of books and other material relevant to the history of medicine. His most famous work is the Principles and Practice of Medicine, which appeared in many editions and translations for over 50 years. An inveterate prankster, he wrote several humorous pieces under the pseudonym Egerton Yorrick Davis, even fooling the editors of the Philadelphia Medical News with a report on the supposed phenomenon of penis captivus. He willed his library to McGill University where it forms the nucleus of McGill University's Osler Library of the History of Medicine, which opened in 1929. Sir William and Lady Osler's ashes rest there among his beloved books.

Perhaps Osler's greatest contribution to medicine was the establishment of the medical residency program, an idea that spread across the country and remains in place today in most teaching hospitals. Through this system, doctors in training make up much of the Hospital's medical staff. The success of his residency system depended, in large part, on its pyramidal structure with interns, fewer assistant residents and a single chief resident, who originally occupied that position for years.

Osler also instituted another first by getting his medical students to the 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 instead of sitting in a lecture hall, dutifully taking notes. He diminished the role of didactic lectures and once said he hoped his tombstone would say only, "He brought medical students into the wards for bedside teaching."

Osler played an interesting role in the history of aging in the United States. He is known in the field of gerontology for his famous speech upon entry into Oxford as their Regis Professor of Medicine in 1905. His speech included some controversial (at the time and still is now) words about old age. He claimed that, "the effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty" and beyond the age of 40 men were pretty much useless and after the age of 60, men were completely useless and should definitely be retired by age 60, if not by 40.

He himself liked to say, "He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all." He is also remembered for saying, "If you listen carefully to the patient they will tell you the diagnosis" which emphasises the importance of taking a good history.

Throughout his life Osler was a great admirer of the 17th century physician and philosopher Sir Thomas Browne. In 1994 he was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame.

Osler House is the student mess for clinical medical students of Oxford University and is found at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. It provides a common room area, computers and freshly made sandwiches.

In 1925 a monumental biography of William Osler was written by Harvey Cushing. A later biography by Michael Bliss was published in 1999.

[edit] Eponyms

Osler lent his name to a number of diseases and symptoms.

Osler's sign is an artificially high blood pressure reading due to atherosclerotic arteries.
Osler's nodes are raised tender nodules on the pulps of finger tips or toes, a sign of infectious endocarditis.
Rendu-Osler-Weber 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)
Sir William Osler Elementary School - Elementary School in Vancouver, British Columbia

[edit] References

Bliss, Michael. William Osler : a life in medicine, University of Toronto Press, c1999. ISBN 0-8020-4349-6
Cushing, Harvey. The life of Sir William Osler, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1925.
Osler, William. The Quotable Osler, American College of Physicians, 2003. ISBN 1-930513-34-8