Osler's "A Way of Life" and Other Addresses, with Commentary and Annotations (review)

Tokyo, 1945. During a ceremony to transfer control of a hospital to Allied Forces, a senior American physician slips his copy of William Osler's Aequanimitas with Other Addresses to Medical Students, Nurses, and Practitioners of Medicine into the hands of a young Japanese physician.

Tokyo, 1980. His dream of translating Osler into Japanese still intact, the now-eminent physician enlists the aid of a professor of nursing who doubles as a Shakespeare scholar. They focus on twenty addresses—sixteen from Aequanimitas, and four others including "A Way of Life." She will spend the next twenty years chasing down Osler's biblical, classical, literary, theological, historical, and contemporary allusions. Their book sells 27,000 copies in Japan, but they do not stop there.

Helped by colleagues around the world, and especially by Dr. John P. McGovern of Houston, Texas, Dr. Shigeaki Hinohara and Professor Hisae Niki now offer their work in English. A brief preface accompanies each of the well-chosen addresses, but what sets this book apart is the incredible footnotes—all 1,565 of them. Having similarly pursued Osler's unreferenced quotations, foreign words and phrases, and historical esoterica, I marvel at these authors' persistence and ultimate accomplishment. In the rare instances in which no answer was found (seven, by my count), one suspects that the fault lies in Osler's overreliance on memory, not in these authors' lack of diligence. The subtlety and sensitivity of the footnotes lend insight into Osler's mindset and how he utilized the range and depth of his reading. We appreciate Osler's fallibility, such as his confusing Elijah with Elisha (p. 290), misinterpreting "Cui bono?" (p. 312), and incorrectly using "he wot" as a past tense, instead of "he wist" (p. 263). We appreciate his coinage of words and phrases such as "day-tight compartments" (p. 5), "popgun pharmacy" (p. 199), "onomatomania" (p. 90), and "the great secret—that happiness lies in the absorption in some vocation which satisifies the soul; that we are here to add what we can to, not to get what we can from, life" (p. 105). We appreciate such colorful terms as "muddy-meddled" (p. 85), "exsuccous dons" (p. 87), "Doctor plexorum" (p. 93), "footing supper" (p. 213), and "sawbones" (p. 265). But above all, we appreciate what Osler had to say, for the great stumbling block to reading him has been lifted.

It has been my experience that those who dismiss Osler as a largely irrelevant Victorian male have not taken the trouble to get to know him. This especially seems to be the case among those anti-Oslerians who, following Gerald Weissman's lead, contend that Osler's "aequanimitas" and "imperturbability" form a poor basis for bedside comportment.¹ Thus, in a major new book about the physician-patient relationship, an author using Osler as a foil commits a conspicuous error—"When his [Osler's] own daughter died, he carefully hid his intense grief"—that escaped the notice of at least ten colleagues who read the manuscript.² As Michael Bliss makes clear in his recent biography, anyone concerned with the history of medicine since 1900 cannot afford to ignore Osler. Hinohara and Niki make his essays accessible and fun.

The gift that keeps on giving: William Osler worked hard to make memorable the occasions of his invited addresses, and in so doing he helped reconcile for his generation the old humanities with the emerging new science. The Eli Lilly Company gave some 150,000 copies of Osler's Aequanimitas to graduating medical students, one of whom, Warner Bowers, gave his to a young Japanese doctor. The recipient and his literary colleague now give back to the English...