The Life of Sir William Osler

Harvey Cushing, himself a pioneering brain surgeon, spent years assembling this two volume life of William Osler, the physician he counted as friend, mentor, and one of the two or three people most responsible for what modern medical education actually looks like. The book follows Osler from his Canadian upbringing through the residency system he built at Johns Hopkins Hospital, a pyramid of many interns narrowing to a single chief resident that spread from Baltimore to teaching hospitals around the world, and it dwells especially on his insistence that medical students learn at the bedside rather than only from lecture and textbook, a principle Cushing frames as Osler's single most consequential belief.

Cushing follows Osler across the Atlantic to his final post as Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, and the book's most affecting chapter turns on the death in the First World War of Osler's only son, Revere, wounded on the Western Front and treated, in a coincidence Cushing does not pass over lightly, by Cushing himself before the young man died. The loss shadows Osler's remaining years, and Cushing, writing as someone who witnessed both the surgery and the friendship, gives that chapter a directness the rest of the biography, more concerned with institutions and teaching philosophy, does not otherwise carry.

Reading it means encountering the history of modern medicine largely through Osler's own famous warmth and wit as a teacher, since Cushing draws heavily on colleagues' and former students' recollections alongside Osler's letters, and it suits a reader interested in how clinical training actually took the shape it still holds in teaching hospitals today. The two volumes run long, befitting a life Cushing clearly regarded as central to his own profession's modern history, and the book rewards a reader willing to follow Osler's career at the same unhurried pace Osler himself brought to a hospital ward.