He quotes from his lifelong favorite author, Sir Thomas Browne, 'The might of our fore-being and the unknown future, the dark before and after he at last came to himself, and with the help of this key unlocked the mysteries of Nature, and found a way of physical salvation."
Osler's absorption with Greek literature and philosophy comes out in the next passages: "Man's Redemption of Man is the great triumph of Greek thought. The taproot of modern science sinks deep in Greek soil, the astounding fertility of which is one of the outstanding facts of history. As Sir Henry Maine says: 'To one small people...it was given to create the principle of progress, that people was the Greek. Except the blind forces of nature no other moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin. Though not always recognized, the controlling principles of our art, literature and philosophy, as well as those of science, are Hellenic...'
'The glory of this zeal for the enrichment of the present life was revealed to the Greek as to no other people, but in respect to care for the body of the common man, we have only seen its fulfillment in our own day, and as a direct result of methods, of research initiated by them."
Osler tried to give proper credit and sequence of events: "On the plains of Mesopotamia, man took a first step in the careful observations of Nature, which carried him a long way in his career, but he was very slow to learn the second step-how to interrogate nature, to search out her secrets, as Harvey puts it, by way of experiment. The Chaldeans, who invented gnomons, and predicted eclipses made a good beginning."
Then Osler returned to Greece to honor Pythagoras, who may truly have been responsible for the Hippocratic Oath: "Pythagoras made one fundamental experiment when he determined the dependence of the pitch of sound on the length of the vibrating
