Walt Whitman and Sir William Osler: A Poet and His Physician (review)

To say that Philip W. Leon’s book is a testament to the art of extrapolation is by no means to belittle it, nor is that the intent behind the comment. It is, rather, an acknowledgment: given little to work with, the author has managed to bring us many facts and some welcome surmises regarding the short-lived relationship between these two nineteenth-century figures, each of whom displayed considerable interest in the other’s field of occupation. Osler, the Canadian physician whose medical skills gained him a world-wide reputation, was extremely well read in literature and history and had a keen appreciation of poetry, though he had not read a line of Whitman at the time of their meeting. Whitman, the U.S.’s great radical poet, had the highest regard for medicine (if not always for individual doctors), and, as a wound dresser and hospital visitor in Washington, D.C., in the Civil War, entered its ranks tangentially. The book contains a number of illustrations, all worthy of attention, though those of Whitman are the more arresting; unfortunately, only two photos of Dr. Osler appear.

Although they knew one another as early as 1885, Osler and Whitman began the doctor-patient relationship in the summer of 1888 after Whitman suffered a severe stroke in his Camden, New Jersey, home—his second stroke, the first having occurred in 1873, leaving his left side impaired. Responding to a request from their mutual friend, the Ontario alienist Dr. Richard M. Bucke, Osler, who was then a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Medical College, became Whitman’s physician (though accepting no fees), terminating his care a year later to go to Baltimore where he was one of the founders of The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

In 1919, the centenary of Whitman’s birth, Osler began preparing a lecture on Whitman that he intended to deliver to students at Oxford, England, but ill health postponed the lecture and death overtook completion of the preparatory notes. The doctor’s “Personal Reminiscences” of Walt Whitman, totaling about 2,500 words, plus a few pages of working notes, are the substance from which Professor Leon draws. Now in the Bibliotheca Osleriana in the Osler Library at McGill University, Montreal, they are published here for the first time with what might have been the scant illumination of scholarly footnotes expanded into short chapters offering full and detailed information on the facts of the brief relationship recorded in the “Reminiscences.” Of somewhat less value are the actual extrapolations, Leon’s speculations on the meaning of Osler’s fragmentary notes, which often tell us more about the doctor’s appreciation of writers and poets other than Whitman.

For the reader who is more familiar with the major events in the life of one of these men, much can be learned here about the other. I found especially interesting the background information on Osler’s reluctance to prescribe drugs and the storm of controversy that arose from a 1905 speech in which he seemed to recommend chloroform for those sixty years of age. The author makes clear the facetious intent of the address and conveys something of Osler’s studied cheerfulness, which gave rise to the controversy and which so annoyed Whitman, who felt the doctor made light of his condition.

Yet, for all their illumination, these expanded notes have a tendency to follow their own lines of development, often leading the reader so far afield that the focus of the work is lost. A chapter that links its two subjects by the fact that the brains of both found their way to the same institute, the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, has little more to add beyond that fact (Whitman’s brain was dropped by a careless worker, and Osler’s yielded nothing notable) and trails off into what is by now a familiar discussion of phrenology. Conversely, a chapter...