William Osler: A Life in Medicine

Cynthia R. Comacchio is an associate professor of history at Wilfrid
Laurier University. She is the author of Nations Are Built of Babies:
Saving Ontario’s Mothers and Children.

William Osler ranks high among national heroes in Canada’s rather
limited pantheon. Born in rural Ontario and educated at McGill
University, Osler pursued medical studies in London, Berlin, and Vienna
before returning to Montreal for a phenomenal decade of teaching,
research, and publication at his alma mater. He continued his stellar
trajectory at the University of Pennsylvania and became one of the six
founding members of the front-ranking Johns Hopkins medical school when
it was established in 1893. Osler finished his illustrious career as
regius professor of medicine at Oxford. Among his myriad contributions
to medical study and practice was Principles and Practice of Medicine,
originally published in 1892, which remained the one true textbook of
modern medicine through the first half of the 20th century.

At roughly half the size of Harvey Cushing’s Pulitzer Prize–winning
Life of Sir William Osler (1925), Bliss’s own award-winning biography
of the physician-icon deftly displaces the earlier tome, if not in close
detail, then certainly to the degree that the author offers up a rich
sociocultural context for Osler’s life and legacy, benefiting from the
perspective that Cushing could not muster only six years after the great
man’s death. Bliss treads a fine line between hagiography and a needed
revisionism in light of the new questions that historians and
biographers have brought to bear on their subjects in recent years. He
considers questions about gender, class, and race that would have been
neglected in Cushing’s day. He reflects on the implications of
Osler’s status as a white, English-speaking, highly educated,
affluent, urban professional—a doctor in a time when medicine was
gaining new public respect and its practitioners, due in no small
measure to their own professionalizing efforts, were becoming the
spokesmen of the new order.

In the end, the evidence appears to sustain the great man’s
reputation. Bliss finds no whiff of condescension toward the needy,
women, and those deemed “racially inferior” in contemporary terms,
much less any hint of scandal. It appears that Osler was one of the rare
men of stature whose exemplary public life was matched by a private one
no less so—at least insofar as we are able to know, especially through
the mists of time, what is truly private. Having turned away from
Christianity, Osler himself believed that only contemporary influence,
and its remembrance, guaranteed immortality.

William Osler is a well-told story of a life well lived. Readers
specifically interested in the subject, in the history of medicine, or
in biographical writing will find the book a particularly compelling
specimen.