"Medicine arose out of the primal sympathy of man with man · Out of the desire to help them in sorrow need and sickness" Sir William Osler
"Sir William Osler, M.D., C.M., 1st Baronet (July 12, 1849 – December 29, 1919) was a Canadian physician. (The "o" in "Osler" is pronounced like the "o" in "go".) He was one of the "Big Four" founding professors at Johns Hopkins Hospital as the first Professor of Medicine and founder of the Medical Service there. (The "Big Four" were William Osler, Professor of Medicine; William Stewart Halsted, Professor of Surgery; Howard A. Kelly, Professor of Gynecology; and William H. Welch, Professor of Pathology.) Osler created the first residency program for specialty training of physicians, and he was the first to bring medical students out of the lecture hall for bedside clinical training.
He has been called the "Father of modern medicine." Osler was a pathologist, physician, educator, bibliophile, historian, author, and renowned practical joker.
Following post-graduate training in Europe, Osler returned to McGill University as a professor in 1874. It is here that he created the first formalized journal club. In 1884 he was appointed Chair of Clinical Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. When he left Philadelphia in 1889, his farewell address Aequanimitas was on the equanimity necessary for physicians.
In 1889 he accepted the position as the first Physician-in-Chief at the new Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland USA and, in 1893, he was one of the first professors of medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. There he quickly increased his reputation as clinician, humanitarian and teacher. He presided over a rapidly expanding domain. In the Hospital's first year of operation, when it had 220 beds, 788 patients were seen for a total of over 15,000 days of treatment. Sixteen years later, when Osler left for Oxford, over 4,200 patients were seen for a total of nearly 110,000 days of treatment.
In 1905 he was appointed to the Regius Chair of Medicine at Oxford, which he held until his death. He was also a Fellow of Christ Church, Oxford. Osler was created a baronet in the Coronation Honours List of 1911 for his many contributions to the field of medicine.
Perhaps Osler's greatest contribution to medicine was to insist that students learned from seeing and talking to patients and the establishment of the medical residency. This latter idea spread across the English-speaking world and remains in place today in most teaching hospitals. Through this system, doctors in training make up much of a hospital's medical staff. The success of his residency system depended, in large part, on its pyramidal structure with many interns, fewer assistant residents and a single chief resident, who originally occupied that position for years.
He liked to say, "He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all." His best-known saying was "Listen to your patient, he is telling you the diagnosis," which emphasizes the importance of taking a good history.
The contribution to medical education of which he was proudest was his idea of clinical clerkship — having third- and fourth-year students work with patients on the wards. He pioneered the practice of bedside teaching making rounds with a handful of students, demonstrating what one student referred to as his method of "incomparably thorough physical examination." Soon after arriving in Baltimore Osler insisted that his medical students attend at bedside early in their training: by their third year they were taking patient histories, performing physicals and doing lab tests examining secretions, blood and excreta.
He reduced the role of didactic lectures and once said he hoped his tombstone would say only, "He brought medical students into the wards for bedside teaching." He also said, "I desire no other epitaph … than the statement that I taught medical students in the wards, as I regard this as by far the most useful and important work I have been called upon to do." Osler fundamentally changed medical teaching in the North America, and this influence, helped by a few such as the Dutch internist Dr. P.K. Pel, spread to medical schools across the globe." (excerpted from (
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