William Osler
Categories: 1849 births | 1919 deaths | Baronets | Book and manuscript collectors | Canadian medical professors | Canadian physicians | History of medicine
From left to right: William Henry Welch, William Stewart Halsted, Osler, Howard Kelly
Sir William Osler (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.
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Biography
He was born in Bond Head, Canada West (now Ontario), raised largely in Dundas, Ontario and studied and taught at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, where he obtained his medical degree in 1872. 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.
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.
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 painful indentations on the muscular pads of hands and feet, a symptom 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)
References
- Bliss, Michael. William Osler : a life in medicine, University of Toronto Press, c1999. ISBN 0802043496
- Cushing, Harvey. The life of Sir William Osler, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1925.