William Osler: Bedside Teaching, a Prankster Alter Ego and a Brain in a Jar

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William Osler was born in Canada in 1849, the son of a former Royal Navy officer who had turned down a berth on the HMS Beagle with Charles Darwin and became a frontier minister. William began studying theology at Trinity College in Toronto until Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici convinced him that studying the body could be a calling of its own. He earned his medical degree at McGill in 1872, trained in Germany under Rudolf Virchow, and in 1889 became the first physician-in-chief of Johns Hopkins Hospital. There he moved students out of lecture halls and onto the wards and created the first formal residency program, with young doctors living in the hospital for years. His Principles and Practice of Medicine became the standard text, though it still endorsed bloodletting into the 1920s.

Away from the bedside he wrote hoax reports under the alias Egerton Yorick Davis, including one on penis captivus to embarrass a rival editor. He also said Canada should remain a white man's country, shipped Indigenous skulls to Germany, and in 1905 suggested little useful work was done after 40. Knighted in 1911 as Regius Professor at Oxford, he lost his only son, Edward Revere Osler, at Passchendaele in 1917. He died of pneumonia in 1919 at 70.

• His farewell speech referenced a novel in which men were chloroformed at 67, causing a press scandal.
• His textbook called pneumonia the friend of the aged.
• He had used his influence to win a commission for his son, whose poor eyesight would normally have kept him off the front lines.
• His brain was donated to the American Anthropometric Society and is now at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia.
• Osler's nodes, painful bumps on the fingertips, remain a sign of endocarditis taught to medical students.