Osler: Inspirations from a Great Physician

No Western physician can match William Osler in terms of the enduring attention he has engendered in his admirers. The combined articles, books, societies, memorabilia, and pilgrimages in his name have been termed the “Osler industry.” Given this, offering up a new book on the man would seem to require an audacity bordering on chutzpah—or a novel approach to a weathered subject, which is what Charles Bryan has attempted and achieved.

Bryan has two goals: to introduce a new generation to Osler’s character, and to show that his messages can speak usefully to medicine a hundred years later. His format draws on models that time-management experts call self-unification or principle-centered living. For Bryan, this means that Osler succeeded because he set clear goals and accomplished them by carefully allocating time based on a hierarchy of personal values and principles. From this approach come the chapter headings: Manage Time Well, Find a Calling, Find Mentors, Be Positive, Learn and Teach, Care Carefully, Communicate, and Seek Balance. At this point the reader may be cringing at the prospect of some jargonistic case study by a disciple of Dale Carnegie, but Bryan avoids this by letting Osler reflect his character traits in his own dated but always elegant prose.

And Bryan gives us not just aphorisms: the quotations are extensive, some running to a full page. To emphasize the magnitude of Osler’s presence, the 219 pages contain some 350 quotations—perhaps half the total text. Yet the book does not come across as cut-and-paste. The quotes are fastidiously chosen and smoothly interpolated among Bryan’s own insights. Despite the absence of an extensive subject index as such, Osler’s ideas are accessible through subheadings in the table of contents and through sixty-eight entries in the index under “Osler on . . . .” The book should quickly become a first source for anyone seeking a pithy and literate passage on humanity and the healing arts.

The doyen of medical illustration in the United States, Max Broedel, drew a cartoon of Osler as “The Saint” of Johns Hopkins Hospital, which Sir William described indulgently as a “scandalous canonization” (p. 155). The caricature could serve as an icon of sorts for those who are bemused by what they see as overkill in the Osler industry. Was WO really the personification of unalloyed virtue? As a contributor to the industry, and having sat through a few cloying presentations on the man, I watched for passages that might be characterized as admissions of imperfection by Osler or others. I found only seven, the most unqualified being that he “was not immune to occasional displays of anxiety, disappointment, frustration, and anger” (p. 143).

This is no criticism of Bryan, who informed us in his title that he was in quest of the inspirational Osler. But if a few warts were uncovered on the man, would they not add to his humanity? To my knowledge no one has fully answered the criticism that archival and manuscript sources, particularly of Osler’s four academic institutions, have been relatively neglected. An example is found in the biography by Harvey Cushing, where he writes: “This confidential letter to President Remsen . . . is perhaps too intimate to publish in full until the still-troubled waters . . . have temporarily quieted down.” ¹

Some may see Bryan’s book as one more example of all that has been decried in the Great Doctors approach to history. Certainly he makes no apologies in this regard. But the “social forces v. individual merit” issue is showing welcome agonal signs. Other than the fact that earlier medical history was unduly dominated by the biographical approach, the argument never had much rhetorical flesh: excepting major natural events—meteorologic, geologic, and biologic—social forces derive from human endeavors. The Renaissance was not some ethereal wave that left Greece and wandered about for a thousand years until it washed across western Europe around 1500. The fact that as the movement grew it in turn inspirited...