56 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. LI. No. 1307 



termediate convalescence, a severe attack of 

 bronchitis, due to exposure through attending 

 a professional considtation, developed into a 

 pneumonia vcith pleurisy and empyema, neces- 

 sitating surgical drainage; and although he 

 had been cheerful three days before his death, 

 the end was gravely apprehended by those 

 around him. He is survived by his widow. 

 Lady Osier, and two brothers, his only son 

 having been killed in the war. 



Sir William Osier, the son of Rev. F. L. 

 Osier of Falmouth, England, was born at 

 Bond Head, Province of Ontario, Canada, on 

 Jidy 12, 1849. A medical graduate of Mc- 

 Gill University (1872) with the customary 

 post graduate study in the London clinics and 

 German universities, he became lecturer and 

 professor of the institutes of medicine at Mc- 

 Gill in 1874 and easily rose, without stress or 

 undue effort, to the top of his profession. 

 In succession, he was professor of medicine 

 at the University of Pennsylvania (1884^9) 

 and the Johns Hopkins University (1889- 

 1904), was appointed Regius professor of 

 medicine at the University of Oxford in 1904 

 and received his baronetcy in 1911. On July 

 11, 1919, his seventieth birthday was honored 

 by the presentation of two anniversary vol- 

 umes made up of contributions by English 

 and American colleagues.^ Due to delays in 

 printing, the completed voliunes reached him 

 only a few days before his death. 



Of Osier's scientific work, it may be said 

 that no great physician has been more firmly 

 grounded in the fundamental disciplines of 

 his calling. Of the arduous years of post- 

 mortem work at Montreal the Pathological 

 Reports of the Montreal General Hospital 

 (1876-80) are a permanent record, as also 

 the eight editions of the great text-book on 

 Practice of Medicine (1892), which has been 

 translated into French, German, Spanish and 

 Chinese. The disciple of Morgagni and Vir- 

 chow is equally apparent in the hundreds of 

 clinical papers, the larger monographs in 

 Osier's "Modern Medicine" (1907-10), the 

 Gullstonian lectures on malignant endocar- 

 ditis (1885), and the separate treatises on 

 the cerebral palsies of children (1889), 

 chorea (1894), abdominal tumors (1895), 



1 Science, September 12, 1919, p. 244. 



angina pectoris (1897), and cancer of the 

 stomach (1900). From the start he did 

 much original investigation of high quality. 

 At the age of twenty-five (1874), he described 

 the blood platelets associated with the name 

 of Bizzozero, and defined their status as the 

 third corpuscle of the blood and their rela- 

 tion to the formation of thrombi. Such early 

 papers as those on the blood in pernicious 

 anemia (1877), overstrain of the heart (1878), 

 fusion of the semi-lunar valves (1880) reveal 

 the born clinical and pathological observer. 

 Osier was a profoimd student of all modes of 

 aneurism, of tuberculosis, of typhoid fever, of 

 disorders of the circulation. He was the first 

 to emphasize the relation between mycotic 

 aneurism and mycotic endocarditis, first de- 

 scribed the ball-valve thrombus at the mitral 

 orifice, the visceral complication of erythema 

 multiforme (1895), chronic cyanosis with 

 polycythemia, laiown as Vaquez' disease 

 (1895), multiple telangiectasis (1901), the 

 erythematous spots in malignant endocarditis 

 (1908), and he discovered the parasite of 

 verminous bronchitis in dogs (filaria Osleri, 

 1877). But to sense the magnitude of Osier's 

 clinical work, it must be taken by and large 

 in the 730 titles of the recently' published 

 Osier Bibliography (1919). 



At the farewell banquet given him in ISTew 

 York in 1904, Osier said that he desired to be 

 remembered in a single line : " He taught 

 clinical medicine in the wards." He found 

 his great opportunity when he became phys- 

 ician to the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Dur- 

 ing the six years intervening between the 

 opening of the hospital (1889) and the begin- 

 ning of undergraduate instruction in medi- 

 cine (1893), Osier blocked out the arrange- 

 ments for a graded whole-time upper resident 

 staff of men of exceptional promise, a lower 

 resident staff of one year internes, careful 

 instruction in case-taking and clinical lab- 

 oratory work for third year students and the 

 appointment of fourth year students as " clin- 

 ical clerks," in actual charge of patients in 

 hospital, for three months each. The feeling 

 of confidence and of personal responsibility 

 acquired by these advantages was further 

 strengthened by assigning advanced pupils to 



