New Osler Biography

"On the day his sister was born little Willie was tethered to a tree along with a calf, and there was a pail of milk close at hand, for which they both struggled, and into which he tumbled and was nearly drowned." Thus Mrs. Edith Gittings Reid, wife of Harry Fielding Reid, Johns Hopkins professor of dynamic geology & geography, begins The Great Physician: A Life of Sir William Osler, published last fortnight.-- Her book is briefer (293 pp.) than Harvey Williams Cushing's two-volume year-by-year life (1,413 pp.). Yet she gives a full picture of "the greatest physician in history." She quotes Dr. William Henry Welch, who brought Osler to help found Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1889, on Osler's "two greatest contributions to medicine, the most important being the first medical clinic [Johns Hopkins'] worthy of the name in any English- speaking country, and the other the publication in 1892 of his text-book [Practice of Medicine] presenting with rare literary skill and unexampled success the principles and practice of medicine adequately and completely for the first time in English after the great revolutionary changes brought about by modern bacteriology."

But it was for his joviality, learning, stimulation and insight that his every patient, student and colleague revered Sir William Osler as a demigod. For more than a decade (he died in 1919 at Oxford whither he had gone from Johns Hopkins), Medicine has agreed that there never was a studious, teaching practitioner like him. A request for a list of living U. S. doctors who approach Osler in knowledge, expertness and teaching last week brought answers from a jury representative of the profession. Out of 36 different names suggested as great in the U. S., the jury agreed only on the Brothers Mayo-- Dr. William James, 70, and Dr. Charles Horace, 66, of the Mayo Clinic. Less complete were agreements on Drs. George Edmund de Schweinitz (ophthalmology), Chevalier Jackson (bronchoscopy), William Williams Keen (surgery), all of Philadelphia; Drs. Howard Atwood Kelly (gynecology, another Johns Hopkins founder) and William Holland Wilmer (ophthalmology), both of Johns Hopkins; Dr. William Hallock Park, Manhattan immunologist. Of the 19 living past presidents of the American Medical Association, nine were absent from all the jury's lists of "great doctors."

*0xford ($3.50).

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