You may or may not have heard of William Osler. He did not discover anything of major importance in medicine and his name does not ring loud or clear in the 21st century. But for fifty years he was the image of what a “physician” should be in three countries – Canada, the United States and Britain. He was a leader in establishing Canadian medicine at McGill, a founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School and then Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, all after being raised in the Canadian backwoods in a preacher’s family. Michael Bliss says many times that the image of Osler seems too good to be true and he went out of his way to find negative points about him or hypocrisy about his image. Bliss says that literally nothing he could find, and the research in this book is enormous, showed Osler to be anything other than an open, honest, brilliant, empathetic physician whose personal life seemed to match his professional one. This is not a hagiography about Osler; it is just a biography of a good and highly intelligent human being who made an enormous impression on the history of Western medicine.
In 504 pages of text I did not once find the writing dull, repetitive or clichéd. Bliss is a smooth and articulate writer who knows when and how to insert humor into the book, largely because Osler himself consistently inserted intelligent humor into his work. You genuinely get to know this man who insisted that science, not “tradition,” be the foundation of medicine and who combined that with a teaching style that was extraordinary. When he made rounds, students flocked to be with him. When he saw a patient, the patient always felt that he or she was the most important person in the world to Osler at that time, and he or she was. Bliss makes this biography a fluent and thoroughly enjoyable read. The reader not only comes to understand Osler but gets a clear and understandable overview of medicine in the late 19th and early 20th century.
I had only marginally heard of Osler beforehand and only then because I had heard that Bliss was a great writer and one of his books was on this physician. When I saw how long this biography was, I seriously questioned whether I wanted to read a book of this length about someone who is not one of the “big names” in the 21st century public consciousness. But it was worth every minute. Smooth, fluent, well-organized and enjoyable writing about an extraordinary physician. This book has my highest recommendation.
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Conhecendo a vida do pai da medicina moderna
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