January 16, 1920] 



SCIENCE 



57 



teach extempore, to read and report on for- 

 eign literature, to cultivate the history of 

 their profession. In his Saturday night meet- 

 ings at his home in West Pranklin Street, his 

 aim with young students was to make good 

 physicians of them, to make good men out 

 of them, to teach them to think for them- 

 selves and to be themselves. As Dr. H. M. 

 Thomas has said, Osier " put the students in 

 the wards, but he did not leave them there; 

 he stayed with them " ; and he adds : " What 

 good there is in me as a teacher and a phys- 

 ician I owe to him." This is the common 

 sentiment, that he took his students with him 

 into the upper reaches of their profession and 

 the broad sunshine of actual life. Only 

 Astley Cooper or Carl Ludwig could have 

 produced such a train of loyal disciples; only 

 Pasteur could have inspired such universal 

 regard and affection. 



Space permits but a passing reference to 

 Osier's work on the history of medicine, to 

 which, through his personal interest and his 

 many tmique contributions, he gave a greater 

 impetus than any other; to his civic activities, 

 his labors in behalf of medical libraries, his 

 splendid service to his country in wartime. 

 His great collection of original texts and 

 documents relating to discoveries and ad- 

 vances in the science and art of medicine, 

 the hobby of his later years, was all but com- 

 pleted as to items, but the big human touch 

 which would have made its catalogue one of 

 the unique things in medical bibliography 

 could only have been given by Osier himself. 



Essentially English in character. Osier had, 

 through his forebears, Cornish and Spanish 

 elements in his composition, easily sensed in 

 the " hauntings of Celtism" in his ringing 

 eloquent voice, the suggestion of the hidalgo 

 in his slender, aristocratic figure, the clean- 

 cut features and the tropical brown eyes. His 

 was the longish head of the man of action, 

 the active practitioner against disease and 

 pain. Osier's warm glance and utter friendli- 

 ness of manner told how naturally fond he 

 was of people. He had the gift of making 

 almost any one feel for the moment as if he 

 were set apart as a valued particular friend, 

 and so became, in effect, a kind of universal 



friend to patients, pupils and colleagues alike. 

 But there was nothing of the politician in 

 him. He rather paid with his person through 

 the demands made by importunate patients 

 and visitors upon his time. Such an effective 

 concentration of the " fluid, attaching char- 

 acter " has seldom been found in a single 

 personality, possessed, as it were, by the im- 

 partial, non-exclusive spirit of all pervading 

 ISTature, " which never was the friend of one," 



But lit for all its generous sun, 

 And lived itself, and made us live. 



Many are the tales of the clever hoaxing 

 and practical joking put over by Osier on his 

 boon companions and professional fellows in 

 his salad days, but the chafling was carried 

 on in such a jolly spirit that it left no sting 

 behind. In his address on the male climac- 

 teric, delivered on the occasion of his retire- 

 ment from the Johns Hopkins faculty, he 

 found to his dismay that he had chaffed a 

 whole nation. The hazards incurred by his 

 chance reference to Trollope's fable about 

 " chloroforming at sixty " have been set forth 

 at undue length in the public press and even 

 on the stage. But Osier's reasoning about the 

 comparative uselessness of men at sixty, iu 

 the face of the imposing array of exceptions 

 in Longfellow's " Morituri Salutamus," was 

 obviously an expression of his essential prefer- 

 ence for and innate sympathy with the on- 

 coming race of younger people, whose worth 

 he had sensed many times over in his be- 

 loved pupils. 



The last two years of Sir William Osier's 

 life were clouded by the death of his only son. 

 Lieutenant Revere Osier, an artillery officer 

 and a youth of great promise, who was killed 

 in the action about Ypres in 1917. This he 

 bore bravely, concealing his grief from his 

 friends and busying himself with his own 

 duties to the sick and wounded, but, the war 

 at an end, his loneliness increased in spite of 

 the companionship of his wife and his ever- 

 generous hospitality to American officers and 

 physicians. Toward the end, his intimates be- 

 gan to realize that he had " trod the upward 

 and the downward slope " and was done with 

 life. Up to that time he had remained cheer- 



