38 Facts About William Osler

Sir William Osler, 1st Baronet, was a Canadian physician and one of the "Big Four" founding professors of Johns Hopkins Hospital.

William Osler has frequently been described as the Father of Modern Medicine and one of the "greatest diagnosticians ever to wield a stethoscope".

William Osler was a person of many interests, who in addition to being a physician, was a bibliophile, historian, author, and renowned practical joker.

William Osler left his large history of medicine library to McGill, where it continues to exist as the Osler Library.

In 1833, Featherstone William Osler announced that he wanted to become a minister of the Church of England.

In 1837, Featherstone William Osler officially retired from the Navy and emigrated to Canada, becoming a "saddle-bag minister" in rural Upper Canada.

William Osler was born in Bond Head, Canada West, on July 12,1849, and raised after 1857 in Dundas, Ontario.

William Osler was educated at Trinity College School.

In 1867, William Osler announced that he would follow his father's footsteps into the ministry and entered Trinity College, Toronto, in the autumn.

In 1868, William Osler enrolled in the Toronto School of Medicine, a privately owned institution that was not part of the Medical Faculty of the University of Toronto.

William Osler lived with James Bovell for a time, and through Johnson, he was introduced to the writings of Sir Thomas Browne; his Religio Medici caused a deep impression on him.

William Osler left the Toronto School of Medicine after being accepted into the MDCM program at the McGill University Faculty of Medicine in Montreal, and he received his medical degree in 1872.

Shortly afterwards, in 1893, William Osler was instrumental in the creation of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and became one of the school's first professors of medicine.

William Osler quickly increased his reputation as a clinician, humanitarian, and teacher.

William Osler was a Student of Christ Church, Oxford.

William Osler was a prolific author and a great collector of books and other material relevant to the history of medicine.

William Osler willed his library to the Faculty of Medicine of McGill University where it now forms the nucleus of McGill University's Osler Library of the History of Medicine.

William Osler was a strong supporter of libraries and served on the library committees at most of the universities at which he taught and was a member of the Board of Curators of the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

William Osler was instrumental in founding the Medical Library Association in North America, alongside employee and mentee Marcia Croker Noyes, and served as its second president from 1901 to 1904.

William Osler was a prolific author and public speaker and his public speaking and writing were both done in a clear, lucid style.

William Osler noted that Avicenna's Canon of Medicine remained "a medical bible for a longer time than any other work".

William Osler said Canada should be a "white man's country" in a 1914 speech given around the time of the Komagata Maru incident involving immigration from India.

William Osler is well known in the field of gerontology for the speech he gave when leaving Hopkins to become the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford.

William Osler, who had a well-developed humorous side to his character, was in his mid-fifties when he gave the speech and in it he mentioned Anthony Trollope's The Fixed Period, which envisaged a college where men retired at 67 and after being given a year to settle their affairs, would be "peacefully extinguished by chloroform".

William Osler claimed that, "the effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty" and it was downhill from then on.

William Osler's speech was covered by the popular press which headlined their reports with "William Osler recommends chloroform at sixty".

William Osler would enhance Davis's myth by signing Davis's name to hotel registers and medical conference attendance lists; Davis was eventually reported drowned in the Lachine Rapids in 1884.

William Osler died at the age of 70, on December 29,1919, in Oxford, during the Spanish influenza epidemic, most likely of complications from undiagnosed bronchiectasis.

The other, Edward Revere William Osler, was mortally wounded in combat in World War I at the age of 21, during the 3rd battle of Ypres.

William Osler's grave is in the Dozinghem Military Cemetery in West Flanders, Belgium.

Lady William Osler was born in Boston in 1854; her paternal great-grandfather was Paul Revere.

Gross died in 1889 and in 1892 she married William Osler who was then professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University.

William Osler was a founding donor of the American Anthropometric Society, a group of academics who pledged to donate their brains for scientific study.

William Osler's brain was taken to the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia to join the Wistar Brain Collection.

William Osler was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1885.

In 1925, a biography of William Osler was written by Harvey Cushing, who received the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for the work.

In 1994 William Osler was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame.

William Osler lent his name to a number of diseases, signs and symptoms, as well as to a number of buildings that have been named for him.