William Osler: A Life in Medicine

William Osler was born in a parsonage in rural Canada on July 12, 1849. Over his seventy-year life, he practiced, taught, and wrote about medicine at Canada's McGill University, America's Johns Hopkins University, and finally as the Regius Professor at Oxford. By the time of his death in England in 1919, he was considered by many to be the greatest doctor in the world.

Osler was a brilliant and innovative teacher, as well as a scholar of disease's natural history, who revolutionized bedside medicine. Idolized by two generations of medical students and practitioners, he came to personify the ideal doctor. Beyond his medical expertise, Osler was a supremely intelligent humanist. His writings, personal life, and experiences during the Great War exemplified the art of living. His legendary compassion elevated his medical practice to an art form, attracting students, colleagues, poets (such as Walt Whitman), politicians, royalty, and ordinary people with extraordinary conditions to his private practice.

William Osler's life illuminates the times in which he lived. This book explores not only the evolution of modern medicine, the training of doctors, holism in medical thought, and the doctor-patient relationship, but also humanism, Victorianism, the Great War, and much more. Meticulously researched, drawing on new sources and offering fresh 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.