Book Review

Those who have long admired Canadian-born William Osler (1849–1919), the brilliant and innovative teacher at McGill University, the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins Hospital and University, and Oxford, will welcome this splendid biography, written with a style and grace that carries the reader through some of the most momentous years of medicine and medical education. Rather than cling to the mystique of Osler, which made legends and created worshipers of the man, Michael Bliss treats this highly literate scientist/humanist honestly and directly—from his early training as an observer and classifier of disease to his support of internationalism, feminism, and the humanities.

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Bliss writes his biography in the context of medicine's coming of age: the loathsome epidemic diseases of cholera, typhus, diphtheria, yellow fever, and smallpox; the pathological findings and statistical studies of the Paris clinical school that overturned traditional depletion therapies; the opening of the frontiers of microbiology; the disappointing alternative therapies; and the helplessness of doctors to cure. Osler, whose medical career preceded the discovery of sulfanilamide and the families of antibiotics, warned of overreliance on drugs and earned a reputation as a therapeutic nihilist, preferring, for example, cold baths and sponging for high fever and encouraging exercise, massage, and diet as the best treatment and prevention of disease.

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