Book Review

Canada and the United States

When Harvey Cushing donated his collection of Osleriana, he remarked that "they will help someone some day to write a better, briefer, and more accurate biography than I have done" (p. 489). Michael Bliss has done so, unearthing additional primary sources and providing a vivid, intimate portrait of a man who is widely regarded as a model physician. This masterly synthesis captures the spirit of the man, his class, and his era. By virtue of Osler's standing in the Anglo-American medical profession at a pivotal moment, it also depicts the landscape of the elite world of scientific medicine.	1
The highlights of Osler's half-century-long career are easily summarized. Raised in rural mid-nineteenth-century Canada, in a modest but well-connected family, he sought out the best available medical training and, by the age of twenty-five, was imparting it to McGill University students. His reputation as an almost prescient diagnostician, a compassionate clinician, an up-to-date scientist, and a prodigious worker won him a "call" to the University of Pennsylvania and, later, to the new Johns Hopkins University and Hospital. Osler literally "wrote the book" on the Principles and Practice of Medicine (1892). Legendary as a teacher, awesome as a bibliophile and classical scholar, and eminently successful in a fashionable practice, Osler capped his career as Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University.	2
But the roster of Osler's impressive accomplishments scarcely imparts to the uninitiated his impact on his contemporaries, his students, and later generations of physicians. Grace Revere Osler called her husband "a nearly saintly person" (p. 448). Others have been less restrained. Nonetheless, Bliss—Devil's Advocate?—resisted writing a hagiography. His meticulous research uncovered no unsavory side to the beatified physician, yet he concluded—in an appropriately Anglican gloss—that Osler was no saint but "medicine's . . . Archbishop of Canterbury" (p. 501).	. . .