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William Osler - Biography

12 July 1849 29 December 1919

William Osler was born in a remote part of Ontario known as Bond Head. He spent a year at Trinity College in Ontario before deciding on a career in medicine. He attended the Toronto Medical College for two years and in 1872 received his M.D. degree from McGill University in Montreal. Like many of his fellow physicians trained in Canada, Osler went abroad for postgraduate study. He studied in London, Berlin, and Vienna before returning to Canada in 1874 and joining the medical faculty at McGill. A year later he was promoted to professor. Osler was elected a fellow of the British Royal College of Physicians in 1883, one of only two Canadian fellows at that time. In 1884 he left Montreal for Philadelphia to become professor of clinical medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. John S. Billings recruited William Osler in 1888 to be physician-in-chief of the soon-to-open Johns Hopkins Hospital and professor of medicine at the planned school of medicine. Osler was the second appointed member of the original four medical faculty, following William H. Welch and preceding Howard A. Kelly and William S. Halsted. He revolutionized the medical curriculum of the United States and Canada, synthesizing the best of the English and German systems. Osler adapted the English system to egalitarian American principles by teaching all medical students at the bedside. He believed that students learned best by doing and clinical instruction should therefore begin with the patient and end with the patient. Books and lectures were supportive tools to this end. The same principles applied to the laboratory, and all students were expected to do some work in the bacteriology laboratory. Osler introduced the German postgraduate training system, instituting one year of general internship followed by several years of residency with increasing clinical responsibilities. William Oslers book, The Principles and Practice of Medicine, first published in 1892, supported his imaginative new curriculum. It was based upon the advances in medical science of the previous fifty years and remained the standard text on clinical
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William Osler - Biography

medicine for the next forty years. Osler, a superb diagnostician and clinician, was greatly esteemed by his peers in this country and abroad. In 1905 he accepted the Regius Professorship of Medicine at Oxford University, at the time the most prestigious medical appointment in the Englishspeaking world. He left Maryland with warm feelings for Hopkins knowing that his sixteen years spent had laid a solid foundation for the future of Hopkins medical education.

(From: 1993 McCall, Nancy, ed. The Portrait Collection of Johns Hopkins Medicine: A Catalog of Paintings and Photographs at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and The Johns Hopkins Hospital. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.)

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