The Persisting Osler III

Considering his enduring contributions, it would seem unnecessary to have to identify Sir William Osler, especially to health professionals—yet to discover the discouraging truth, you need only ask a few physician friends or medical students who the man was and why he remains important to medicine. Osler was a Canadian physician whose life spanned the turn of the twentieth century with academic appointments at the universities of McGill, Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins, and Oxford. As a clinician-humanist he became an icon of the Compleat Physician during his lifetime, and has remained so since. The latest flurry of interest in Sir William was fueled by Michael Bliss's wonderful 1999 biography, a review of which led Philip Teigen to employ the term "Osler industry" in describing the clubs, societies, and innumerable words devoted to the man around the world. 1 [End Page 446] Despite its pejorative overtone, the term had a distinctively heuristic effect and will likely appear in future discussions of Osler's legacy

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