For Osler's promises to medicine and patients I must keep. Like Davison, in Osler a hero I have found, And to his Way of Life I will also be bound. In Canada, the United States and Great Britain Sir William Osler is known as "The Great Physician," Who still stimulates and inspires each of us To study, learn and to earn our patients' trust.
Since early childhood, poetry has been the vehicle for expressing my strongest feelings and praise. Any further poetry will be Sir William Osler's preferences. He used poetry in almost all of his presentations, and he was so prone to credit other authors that I believe that when he did not the poetry was actually his. In the 1970's I discussed this possibility in a presentation, "Osler and Drake in Rhyme."
Who was Sir William Osler? Does he still have an influence in the practice of medicine? As long as speakers such as I am are asked to speak about him, and as long as he is quoted in the hospital wards and in articles, he does still influence us. It is universally accepted that he exerted a wider influence upon the medical profession than any other physician of his time. For those who have not heard about him, the "postage- stamp" biography that follows may be of interest.
Osler was born at Bond Head, Ontario, Canada, in 1849, the son of a Protestant minister and a strong, resolute mother. He attended Trinity College School, where William A. Johnson gave him Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici, and he attended the Toronto Medical School. Osler had an early inclination to follow his father into the ministry. While under the aegis of Dr. James Bovell, a professor at Trinity College and the Toronto Medical School, Osler found, by chance, Sir Thomas Carlysle's famous statement, "Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand."
