Osler transmitted--a study in humanism.

THE PLAN of my oration is to consider three questions, by whom is Osler transmitted, by what means and to what end? And because Osler is praised as a humanist, we shall need to examine that chameleon word, on our way to the finish that crowns the work-the moral. My title, Osler transmitted, well understood by Oslerolators, comes from Osler's classification of authors as Creators, Transmuters and Transmitters when opening the Bodley Shakespeare Exhibition in Oxford on 24 April 1916. He instanced Shakespeare as the world's greatest creator, Francis Bacon as the first of the modem transmuters, and Robert Burton as the last of the great transmitters. 'At the command of Prospero', he began, 'the authors . . . would arrange themselves in three groups', the transmitters (of learning) 'swarming black over Port Meadow and the soft, low-lying Cumnor hills', the creators fitting perhaps on to Harvard President Eliot's seven-foot book shelf. 'The melting-pot of the transmuters has changed the world . .. [they] have given to man his world dominion.' Osler put them into his Bibliotheca Prima in his Library Catalogue, 'the essential literature grouped about the men of the first rank, arranged in chronological order'. These transmuters have forged from the designs of the creators the tools of thought and action, from antiquity through the intellectual highlands of seventeenth-century England where dwelt Bacon, Harvey, Willis, Sydenham, Boyle, and on as far as nineteenth-century Rontgen. Twentieth-century wonders have since added more than a handful of fresh transmuters.