Bliss's Osler

SUMMARY: William Osler's medical career spanned two centuries and three nations: Canada, the United States, and Great Britain. Though not an especially noted scientist, he was an innovative teacher, a professional organizer, and mentor and colleague to many grateful--indeed, sometimes adoring--students and colleagues, some of whom became influential in the Anglo-Saxon medical world. Since his death, Osler has been the subject of an enormous body of literature, fed by numerous Osler societies throughout the world. Among these is the American Osler Society, upon whose recent review panel this symposium is based. In it, three Oslerians--Philip Teigen, Earl Nation, and Joseph Lella--use Michael Bliss's book as the starting point for reading historical themes in Osler's life from their own standpoints. Bliss responds to these views by stressing the factual underpinnings of his book and by interpreting it, the first major biography of Osler since Cushing, in the context of his other works in the history of medicine as another study of the emergence of "health care as a secular replacement for traditional religious faith in the supernatural."

KEYWORDS: Osler, Cushing, Bliss, American Osler Society, Osler societies, constructing history, biography, late-nineteenth-early-twentieth-century medicine

Fifteen years ago in the pages of this journal Philip Teigen cited several rather remarkable statistics concerning William Osler: namely, that he has been "the subject of a mountain of secondary literature (more than 1,600 items recorded to date)," and that "the Science Citation Index cited him an average of 120 times per year between 1955 and 1984." ¹ He continued: "while this is not a large number for a modern scientist, his citations far outnumber those of three of his contemporaries, John Shaw Billings (five per year), S. Weir Mitchell (fourteen per year), and William H. Welch (thirteen per year)." ² Teigen rather sardonically labeled much of this activity as products of the "Osler industry," constructing "Osler the medical hero," the "Osler of the Osler clubs around the world." ³

This was written in a review of The Persisting Osler: Selected Transactions of the First Ten Years of the American Osler Society. ⁴ Since then, a volume of the second ten years has been published, ⁵ and one for the third decade is in preparation. Along with these, volume 2 of An Annotated Checklist of Osleriana has just been published, along with a new edition of an earlier volume, thus bringing the number of items in both to 1861. ⁶

And yet, as Teigen noted back then, it still has not all been said. During his lifetime (1849-1919) and up to the present day, Osler has come to represent "important values and ideals for twentieth-century physicians and biomedical scientists." ⁷ The interpretation of these ideals and values continues to evolve. Teigen continued: "[what] meanings he embodies and how he and the Osler industry interact is not yet clear, but the complexity of this social process . . . should make Osler and the Osler industry of considerable interest to social historians." ⁸

Michael Bliss, a professional historian and professor of Canadian history at the University of Toronto, joined the American Osler Society in 1996 after publishing several major works on Canadian medical history. These included his particularly acclaimed work, The Discovery of Insulin, which received the Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine in 1984. ⁹ Since that time, he has presented a number of papers on Osler's life to the AOS while working on William Osler: A Life in Medicine. When published in 1999, it was the first major biography of Osler since Harvey Cushing's Pulitzer Prize-winning work in 1925. ¹⁰ Because of the widespread interest in Bliss's project, it seemed natural to mount a review symposium at the AOS. This took place on Thursday, 17 May 2000...