“There are only two sorts of doctors: those who practice with their brains, and those who practice with their tongues.”
—William Osler
About Sir William Osler:
Sir William Osler is a Canadian physician and one of the founding members of John Hopkins Hospital. He is considered the father of modern medicine and one of the “greatest diagnosticians ever to wield a stethoscope”. He was the first person to introduce a residency program for training of doctors and he was first to bring medical students to bedside clinics. He has founded the History of Medicine Society (formally “section”), at the Royal Society of Medicine, London. He is also noted as an author and historian. He had played key role is establishing the Medical Library Association of Great Britain and Ireland, and the (North American) Association of Medical Librarians (later the Medical Library Association).
In 1889, he became the first Physician in Chief of the new Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1893, Osler became one of the first professors of medicine Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Other than his work in medicine, he is also popularly known for his practical pranks. One of the most renowned ones include him writing several humorous pieces under the pseudonym “Egerton Yorrick Davis”, and even fooling the editors of the Philadelphia Medical News into publishing a report on the extremely rare phenomenon of penis captivus. He died at the age of 70, in Oxford, during the Spanish influenza epidemic. His brain was donated to the American Anthropometric Society after his death and is currently stored at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia.
Osler nodes, osler sign, osler Weber rendeu disease, osler maneuver, osler rule and many other diseases and signs are named after him.
