William Osler

William Osler was born on 12 July 1849 at Bond Head, Canada West (now Ontario), the son of an Anglican missionary clergyman. He first intended to enter the ministry but turned to medicine, graduating from McGill University in 1872 and studying in London, Berlin and Vienna. He taught at McGill and then at the University of Pennsylvania before becoming, in 1889, the first physician-in-chief of the new Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. There he insisted that medical students learn on the wards, examining patients themselves, and he organized the training of young doctors who lived in the hospital, the origin of the modern residency. His textbook The Principles and Practice of Medicine (1892) was used for decades. He was famous for his kindness to patients, his humour and his love of old books. In 1905 he became Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford and was made a baronet in 1911. His only son, Revere, was killed in the First World War in 1917, a grief from which he never recovered. Osler died in Oxford on 29 December 1919.

Faith: A practicing Anglican from a very religious family. Source: Wikipedia

See also: Hippocrates · Thomas Sydenham · Walter Reed