Reputation unrevised: celebrating the Osler sesquicentennial.

Thursday, July 12, 1849, was a pleasant summer day in the hamlet of Bond Head, Ont., 40 miles north of Toronto. For most of the locals — largely Irish Protestants — it was a festive occasion featuring a parade in memory of William of Orange, a celebration traditionally lubricated with fiery homebrew. Mrs. Featherstone Osler’s lack of interest in these proceedings is easily understood: she was busy having her seventh baby. If a boy, he was to be named Walter Farquhar Osler. And so he would have been had he arrived on Wednesday or Friday. But Thursday was Orangeman’s Day in an Orange community, and paraders gave the Oslers strong hints that William was a very fine name indeed. Thus we commemorate Sir William, not Sir Walter. The variety of articles about Osler in this issue suggests the remarkable range of writings about the man: a terse, analytic life summary by Michael Bliss, author of the first full-scale biography of Osler in 75 years; a philosophical speculation about what Osler might have thought of turnof-the-millennium medicine by D.J. Weatherall, Osler’s most recent successor as Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford; and a tantalizingly tangential item of Osleriana, an account of the World War II Liberty Ship the SS William Osler, by Charles S. Bryan from the University of South Carolina and Marilyn Fransiszyn of McGill University. Launched on March 6, 1943, in Baltimore, the SS William Osler had an undistinguished and uneventful career as a supply ship and was recommissioned the following year as the hospital ship Wisteria to carry casualties on the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean. Eventually and ignominiously, but with her original name restored, she was scrapped in Oregon in 1969. Osler the historical figure has survived better than Osler the ship. In outlining Osler’s life and career, Bliss ponders the why of Osler’s continuing popularity. Osler’s humanism is often invoked, but Bliss observes that no one reading his Principles and Practice of Medicine today would find it very patient centred. This I would not question, although I doubt anyone reads Osler’s textbook now, anyway. Of course, this does not mean that Osler did not practise humanistically, or that he cannot be a useful role model in 1999 and beyond. Accounts of Osler’s approach to practice and to patients, written by colleagues, students and, occasionally, patients or their loved ones give some hint as to how he functioned in the sickroom. A particularly memorable example comes from Cushing’s biography. While he was preparing the book, Cushing received a letter from the mother of one of Osler’s young patients. She wrote: