William Osler

Sir William Osler, 1st Baronet (July 12, 1849 – December 29, 1919) was a Canadian physician who helped found Johns Hopkins Hospital as one of its "Big Four" professors. He pioneered the first residency program for specialized medical training and is often called the Father of Modern Medicine, as well as one of the finest diagnosticians ever to use a stethoscope. Beyond medicine, he was a book collector, historian, author, and a well-known practical joker. He had a deep commitment to medical libraries and medical history, establishing the History of Medicine Society at London's Royal Society of Medicine. He also played a key role in founding the Medical Library Association of Great Britain and Ireland, and alongside three others—including Margaret Charlton, the medical librarian at his alma mater, McGill University—he helped create the (North American) Association of Medical Librarians, later the Medical Library Association. He bequeathed his extensive history of medicine library to McGill, where it became the Osler Library.

**Biography**

**Family** William Osler's great-grandfather, Edward Osler, was described as either a merchant seaman or a pirate. One of William's uncles, Edward Osler (1798–1863), served as a medical officer in the Royal Navy and wrote *Life of Lord Exmouth* and the poem *The Voyage*. William's father, the Reverend Featherstone Lake Osler (1805–1895), was the son of a shipowner from Falmouth, Cornwall, and had been a lieutenant in the Royal Navy aboard HMS *Victory*. In 1831, Featherstone was asked to join HMS *Beagle* as the science officer for Charles Darwin's voyage to the Galápagos Islands, but declined because his own father was dying. In 1833, he announced his intention to become a Church of England minister. As a teenager, Featherstone survived a near-destruction of HMS *Sappho* during Atlantic storms that left the ship adrift for weeks, and later was shipwrecked off Barbados while in the Navy. He retired from the Navy in 1837 and emigrated to Canada, where he worked as a "saddle-bag minister" in rural Upper Canada. When Featherstone and his bride, Ellen Free Picton, arrived in Canada, they were nearly shipwrecked again on Egg Island in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Their children included William, Britton Bath Osler, and Sir Edmund Boyd Osler.

**Early life** William Osler was born on July 12, 1849, in Bond Head, Canada West (Ontario), and from 1857 was raised in Dundas, Ontario. He was named after William of Orange, who won the Battle of the Boyne on July 12, 1690. His deeply religious mother hoped he would become a priest. He attended Trinity College School (then in Weston, Ontario). In 1867, Osler announced he would follow his father into the ministry and entered Trinity College at the University of Toronto that autumn. However, under the influence of James Bovell and the Reverend William Arthur Johnson, he grew increasingly interested in medical science and changed his career path. In 1868, he enrolled in the Toronto School of Medicine, a private institution not part of the University of Toronto's medical faculty. He lived with Bovell for a time, and through Johnson encountered the writings of Sir Thomas Browne; Browne's *Religio Medici* left a deep impression. Osler left the Toronto School of Medicine after being accepted into the MDCM program at McGill University's Faculty of Medicine in Montreal in 1870, earning his medical degree in 1872. While at McGill, he lived on lower Saint Urbain Street, near the medical school on Côté Street. A practicing Anglican, he regularly attended the "free seat" Chapel of St. John the Evangelist on Dorchester Street (now René Lévesque Boulevard). He held the chapel's rector, Fr. Edmund Wood, in high regard for his care of the poor. Osler owned personal copies of the 1662 *Book of Common Prayer* and *Hymns Ancient and Modern*, now kept in the Osler Library of the History of Medicine at McGill. Later, Osler and Fr. Wood helped install a memorial stained glass window honoring Rev. Dr. William Wright, a professor of *Materia medica* at McGill's medical faculty and a longtime associate priest at the Church of St. John the Evangelist, which had moved to a new building on Ontario Street (now President Kennedy Avenue) and Saint Urbain.

**Career** After postgraduate training under Rudolf Virchow in Germany, Osler returned to McGill's Faculty of Medicine as a professor in 1874. There he established the first formal journal club, pursued an interest in comparative pathology, and is credited with being the first to teach veterinary pathology in North America as part of a broad understanding of disease. In 1884, he became Chair of Clinical Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and in 1885 was one of seven founding members of the Association of American Physicians, dedicated to advancing scientific and practical medicine. When he left Philadelphia in 1889, his farewell address, "Aequanimitas," focused on the imperturbability and equanimity needed by physicians. That same year, he became the first Physician-in-Chief at the new Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1893, he helped create the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and became one of its first professors of medicine. He quickly built a reputation as a clinician, humanitarian, and teacher, overseeing the hospital's first year of operation, when it had 220 beds and 788 patients.