John P. McGovern, MD: A Lifetime of Stories

Chapter Two. The Osler/Davison Connection

To understand John P. McGovern is to know Wilburt Cornell Davison (1892–1972) and Sir William Osler (1849–1919). Davison, a Rhodes scholar, trained with Osler at Oxford during the years 1913–1916, then returned to the United States to complete a medical degree at Johns Hopkins and join the pediatrics faculty. In 1927 he was recruited from Baltimore to Durham as the founding dean of the Duke University School of Medicine. There he would build the school from the ground up, opening its doors in 1930. Nine years later Jack McGovern arrived at Duke for his undergraduate college years in hopes of being admitted to the medical school Davison had built. The Osler/Davison/McGovern connection was a bond that helped shape McGovern’s professional life. Osler influenced Davison in profound ways.1 And Davison, in turn, influenced McGovern and the entire generation of young men and women who trained at the Duke University School of Medicine during the Davison years.2 McGovern’s respect for Davison and his gratitude to him burst out in a heartfelt encomium years later, in 1966, when he was forty-five years old, in a letter to the beloved mentor, whose “greatness,” he wrote, “ . . . has been my profoundest source of inspiration during these past 22 years.” He went on: No one who has known you and basked in your sunshine can really ever be the same thereafter, for you have that magical quality that inspires men to grow. . . . The Osler/Davison Connection Chapter Two the osler/davison connection | 43 Yours is a strong and wonderful phenomenon, difficult to define for us lesser men, for it must be compounded of indefinable qualities of heart and spirit and mind that are combined harmoniously only in the greatest of men. . . . No doubt Osler, and perhaps Welch, had certain of these qualities in good measure, and, from everything that I read about Osler and in contemplation of your own expressed feelings for him, he must have had. All that I can say is that I have never known or met anyone during my 45 years of existence who has whatever it is that I am talking about to the high degree embodied in yourself.3 At Dean Davison’s memorial service held in the chapel at Duke on November 17, 1972, a clearly shaken McGovern turned to Shakespeare to express his loss: “And so I pay tribute to my lifelong hero and benefactor in medicine whose life so enriched my own that I can truly say about the Dean what Hamlet said about his father: ‘He was a man, take him for all in all. I shall not look upon his like again.’”4 The Osler Connection Who was the mentor’s mentor? Few who knew young Willie Osler as a boy growing up in Bond Head, Ontario, near Toronto, could imagine that the prankster who played practical jokes on them would one day become one of the most beloved and influential physicians of all time. After all, in 1866, when he was fourteen, Osler and his schoolmates barricaded the door of the school housekeeper and subjected her to the noxious fumes of molasses, pepper, and mustard heated on the schoolroom stove. For this he was expelled from school and sentenced to two days in jail, in addition to which he merited a mention the Toronto Globe in an article headed “School Row at Weston. Pupils Turned Outlaws. They Fumigate the Matron with Sulfur.”5 Born in 1849 to an Anglican clergyman and his wife, William Osler began his undergraduate studies at Trinity College in Toronto with the intention of following his father’s footsteps into the ministry. But his developing interest in the natural sciences, for which he was suited by a fine intellect and keen powers of observation, soon led him to medicine. The Reverend William Arthur Johnson and two physicians, James Bovell and Palmer Howard, were early mentors who nurtured his interests. Johnson 44 | chapter two and Bovell gave him access to his first microscope and medical books. Howard fueled his love for clinical care and teaching. In 1868 Osler entered the Toronto Medical School; by 1870 he had moved to the McGill University School of Medicine in Montreal, which was considered to offer the best medical education in Canada. He graduated in 1872 and then, as was common at the time, set off to Europe with the object of seeing and...