Sir William Osler and French medicine.

'ONLY those of us, Mr. President, who have had the good fortune to hold the distinguished position which, by your kind grace, Sir, I hold today, only those who have delivered the Oslerian oration, can appreciate the extraordinary difficulties besetting a subject, every aspect of which has been considered, very often too, by men who have brought to the task a combination of learning and literary skill at once the envy and the despair of their successors.' I believe that this is the fairest homage that can be paid to William Osler: to repeat and to apply to him the very words he spoke, exactly sixty years ago, about William Harvey. When your President, Dr. Noel Poynter, and your Secretary, Dr. Geraint James, invited me to speak before your honourable company, they did me a great favour, for which I thank them most heartily. But, by giving me their suggestion for the subject of this Commemorative Address, they brought me to grips with a thankless and difficult task. To confine, for the sake of the argument, the influence of such a universal man as Osler to the proportions of one single country, is to cut down most regrettably the size of the man and to set very artificial limits to the scope of his work. Did not he himself write: 'The true .student is a citizen of the world ... The great minds, the great works transcend all limitations of time, of language, and of race'. The sources of his culture, the influence of his scientific work, the lessons of his teaching, the greatness of his humanism, the far-reaching influence of his thought, and the quality of his literary talent are a common treasury that defies fragmentation. Like the ffight of the eagle, the genius of learned men knows no frontiers ... Since however, such are the requirements of the moment, I shall strictly confine myself to the flattering mission that I have been given. The theme I am about to develop makes up a harmonious triptych. On the left-hand panel, Osler himself inscribes the debt that his medical knowledge and his enlightened humanism owe to France, a country for which he has always shown a great deal of affection and admiration. The middle panel carries the testimony of the friendly personal relations and of the understanding intellectual exchanges which the professor of McGill University, the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins Hospital and Oxford University, established during the course of his stays in France. Finally on the right-hand panel, balancing the first, I shall make a reckoning of the debt which contemporary French Medicine owes to William Osler in many fields.