Doctors' Work: The Legacy of Sir William Osler

Ashley Thomson is a full librarian at Laurentian University and co-editor or co-author of nine books, most recently Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988-2005.

Sir William Osler is likely Canada’s best-known physician even though
the bulk of his career was spent in both the United States and Britain.
Born in 1849, Osler completed his medical education at McGill University
in 1872. Three years later, he became a professor at that university’s
school of medicine and then, in 1884, moved to the medical faculty at
the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Four years later, he
became a founding professor at the new Johns Hopkins Medical School in
Baltimore. Along with three other colleagues, he transformed the
organization and curriculum of clinical teaching and made Johns Hopkins
the most famous medical school in the world. In 1905, Osler moved to
Britain as the Regius chair of medicine at the University of Oxford;
while in that country, he was instrumental in the formation of the
Association of Physicians of Great Britain and Ireland and the
establishment of the Quarterly Journal of Medicine.

Throughout his life, Osler was a prolific author whose capstone
publication, Principles and Practice of Medicine, came out in 1892, the
same year he married Grace Gross, great granddaughter of Paul Revere. In
England, the two became famous for their hospitality to others until
Osler’s untimely death in 1919.

As an author, Osler was renowned for the clarity of his thought, and
his ability to express himself in pithy, often humorous, ways. It is
this aspect of his career that Doctors’ Work celebrates. After short
introductions by others on Osler’s life, his reading interests, and
his hospitality, Grant, himself renowned as a medical photographer, sets
out a beautiful collection of black-and-white photographs that are
accompanied by appropriate captions, many from Osler, but also from
others, like Hippocrates and the author. Opposite a photo of nurses
scrubbing up, for example, is Osler’s comment: “Certainly you have
made the practice of medicine easier to the physician.” Doctors’
Work is a beautiful overview of medical life that can only enhance the
reputation Osler already has.