Sir William Osler (1849-1919) / [Fielding H. Garrison].

  • Fielding Hudson Garrison
Date:
1920
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Sir William Osler (1849-1919) / [Fielding H. Garrison]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    SIR WILLIAM OSLER (1849-1919) After a tedious and painful illness, Sir William Osier, Regius professor of medicine at Oxford, died at his home in Horham Gar¬ dens on December 9, 1919. In spite of in¬ termediate convalescence, a severe attack of bronchitis, due to exposure through attending a professional consultation, developed into a pneumonia with pleurisy and empyema, neces¬ sitating surgical drainage; and although he had been cheerful three days before his death, the end was gravely apprehended by those around him. He is survived by his widow, Lady Osier, and two brothers, his only son having been killed in the war. Sir William Osier, the son of Rev. F. L. Osier of Falmouth, England, was born at Bond Head, Province of Ontario, Canada, on July 12, 1849. A medical graduate of Mc¬ Gill University (1872) with the customary post graduate study in the London clinics and German universities, he became lecturer and professor of the institutes of medicine at Mc¬ Gill in 1874 and easily rose, without stress or undue effort, to the top of his profession. In succession, he was professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (1884-9) and the Johns Hopkins University (1889- 1904), was appointed Regius professor of medicine at the University of Oxford in 1904 and received his baronetcy in 1911. On July 11, 1919, his seventieth birthday was honored by the presentation of two anniversary vol¬ umes made up of contributions by English and American colleagues.1 Due to delays, in > 1 Science, September 12, 1919, p. 244. printing, the completed volumes reached him only a few days before his death. Of Osier’s scientific work, it may be said that no great physician has been more firmly grounded in the fundamental disciplines of his calling. Of the arduous years of post¬ mortem work at Montreal the Pathological Reports of the Montreal General Hospital (1876—80) are a permanent record, as also the eight editions of the great text-book on Practice of Medicine (1892), which has been translated into French, German, Spanish and Chinese. The disciple of Morgagni and Vir¬ chow is equally apparent in the hundreds of clinical papers, the larger monographs in Osier’s “Modern Medicine” (1907—10), the Gullstonian lectures on malignant endocar¬ ditis (1885), and the separate treatises on the cerebral palsies of children (1889), chorea (1894), abdominal tumors (1895), angina pectoris (1897), and cancer of the stomach (1900). From the start he did much original investigation of high quality. At the age of twenty-five (1874), he described the blood platelets associated with the name of Bizzozero, and defined their status as the third corpuscle of the blood and their rela¬ tion to the formation of thrombi. Such early papers as those on the blood in pernicious anemia (1877), overstrain of the heart (1878), fusion of the semi-lunar valves (1880) reveal the born clinical and pathological observer. Osier was a profound student of all modes of aneurism, of tuberculosis, of typhoid fever, of disorders of the circulation. He was the first to emphasize the relation between mycotic
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