In 1900, Sir William Osler was one of the best-known physicians in the English-speaking world. Born in Simcoe County at Bond Head in 1848, his father was Featherstone Osler, the son of a merchant in Falmouth. Featherstone, who became an Anglican missionary, arrived in the wilderness of Upper Canada as a representative of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.
The Osler family moved to Dundas where William became a student at Trinity College before finishing his medical degree at McGill in 1872. He was only 23 years old. By the time Dr. William Osler joined the medical faculty at McGill, Louis Pasteur had just begun to examine the micro-organisms of disease among animals and men. For a decade at McGill, the young man from Bond Head championed modernization and scorned useless treatment.
And then, he moved to the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Medical School in Baltimore where he began to revolutionize medical education. After 16 years, he took an appointment to the chair of Medicine in Oxford where Dr. Osler wrote a pioneering medical textbook, the Principles and Practices of Medicine. First published in 1892, it became a standard world-wide medical text for over thirty years.
Sir William Osler of Bond Head was an extraordinary doctor. The famous Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield was among the many medical practitioners he influenced. Sir William died of pneumonia in 1919. His ashes rest in the Osler Library in Montreal.
Originally aired February 23rd 2016
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