XVlll 



Obituary Notices of Fellows deceased. 



to him without his seeking it, and his was the rare distinction of having 

 occupied professorial chairs in four universities, in three English-speaking 

 countries, each one of which he was invited to fill. 



His father, the Eev. Featherstone Osier, a clergyman of the Church 

 of England, emigrated, with his wife, in the year 1837, from Cornwall to 

 Canada, to take up missionary work in that country, and settled in the 

 Xjrovince of Ontario. There, in 1849, at Bond Head, the subject of this 

 memoir was born, the eighth of a family of nine children, several members of 

 which have attained to positions of distinction. His father, who died in 

 1895, and his mother, who reached the patriarchal age of a hundred years, 

 lived to see and to rejoice in the successes of their sons. When the boy was 

 nine years old his parents removed to the more settled district of Dundas 

 Valley, where was a good grammar school. At his second school, at Weston, 

 near Toronto, Osier came under the influence of one of those who helped to 

 shape his career, the Eev. W. A. Johnson, the head master, a man keenly 

 interested in natural science and who possessed a microscope. He it was 

 who first awakened in his responsive pupil a zeal for microscopic work and 

 those scientific interests which played so large a part in shaping his later life. 



Probably each one of us cherishes the memory of such teachers who 

 influenced us strongly, and although these guiding personalities of our early 

 days tend to assume heroic proportions with the lapse of years, the parts 

 which they play in our lives admit of no qviestion. Osier was fond of 

 recalling three such men, of whom Johnson was one, and to that trio he 

 dedicated his text-book of medicine. 



Influenced by his upbringing. Osier contemplated following in his father's 

 footsteps and taking orders. With that intention he entered at the Trinity 

 College, Toronto, where he came under the second of the three teachers, 

 James Bovell, Professor of the Institutes of Medicine, a physician who 

 himself afterwards took orders. Having relinquished the idea of entering 

 the Church, Osier took up the study of medicine, his true vocation, and, after 

 two years spent at the University of Toronto, migrated to McGill University, 

 Montreal, where he completed his medical course, and graduated in 1872. 



At McGill he was a pupil of Dr. Palmer Howard, the Professor of 

 Medicine, the third of his outstanding teachers, who probably influenced him 

 most of all. 



After taking his degree he proceeded to Europe, and worked in London, at 

 University College, in Berlin and Vienna, under a number of distinguished 

 men, including Jenner, Wilson Fox, Einger, Virchow, and Nothnagel. The 

 experience thus gained in British and Continental methods of medical 

 education and research stood him in good stead when he was called upon to 

 -organize the medical clinic at the Johns Hopkins University. 



In 1874 Osier returned to Montreal, to take up the Professorship of the 

 Institutes of Medicine at McGill, at the early age of twenty-five. 



The ten years during which he held that Chair were years of active ' 

 X^rogress of the school, and in that progress he had no small part. 



