William Osler

William Osler was born in a parsonage in backwoods Canada on July 12 1849. In a life lasting seventy years he practiced taught and wrote about medicine at Canada''s McGill University America''s Johns Hopkins University and finally as Regius Professor at Oxford. At the time of his death in England in 1919 many considered him to be the greatest doctor in the world. Osler who was a brilliant innovative teacher and a scholar of the natural history of disease revolutionized the art of practicing medicine at the bedside of his patients. He was idolized by two generations of medical students and practitioners for whom he came to personify the ideal doctor. But much more than a physician Osler was a supremely intelligent humanist. In both his writings and his personal life and through the prism of the tragedy of the Great War he embodied the art of living. It was perhaps his legendary compassion that elevated his healing talents to an art form and attracted to his private practice students colleagues poets (Walt Whitman for example) politicians royalty and nameless ordinary people with extraordinary conditions. William Osler''s life lucidly illuminates the times in which he lived. Indeed this is a book not only about the evolution of modern medicine the training of doctors holism in medical thought and the doctor-patient relationship but also about humanism Victorianism the Great War and much else. Meticulously researched drawing on many new sources and offering new interpretations William Osler: A Life in Medicine brings to life both a fascinating man and the formative age of twentieth-century medicine. It is a classic biography of a classic life both authoritative and highly readable.