The Life of Sir William Osler

Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1925. Volume I Presumed First U.K. Edition, First Impression; Volume II Second Impression. Hardcover. Good. Mixed Set. Volume I, xiii, [3], 685, [3] pages. Volume II [Second Impression], x, [3], 728 pages. Illustrations [all listed are present]. Footnotes. Index. Ex-library stamp inside back cover of Volume I. Cover has wear and soiling. No dust jacket present. Some minor bottom staining noted in volume I. Some minor page rippling at bottoms. Harvey Williams Cushing (April 8, 1869 - October 7, 1939) was an American neurosurgeon, pathologist, and writer. Cushing was commissioned as a major in the U.S. Army Medical Corps on May 5, 1917. He was director of the U.S. base hospital attached to the British Expeditionary Force in France. Cushing also served as the head of a surgical unit in a French military hospital outside of Paris. Cushing experimented with the use of electromagnets to extract metallic shrapnel fragments that were lodged within the brain. On June 6, 1918, he was was assigned as senior consultant in neurological surgery for the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe. He treated Lieutenant Edward Revere Osler, who was fatally wounded during the third battle of Ypres. Lieutenant Osler was the son of Sir William Osler. A pioneer of brain surgery, he was the first exclusive neurosurgeon and the first person to describe Cushing's disease. Cushing developed many of the basic surgical techniques for operating on the brain. This established him as one of the foremost leaders and experts in the field. Under his influence neurosurgery became a new and autonomous surgical discipline. Cushing authored the Pulitzer prize-winning biography, Life of Sir William Osler. A 1942 review of this work stated: THE life of William Osler by Harvey Cushing, published in 1925, has held its place, and must continue to do so, as one of the greatest of medical biographies. Sir William Osler, 1st Baronet, FRS FRCP (July 12, 1849 - December 29, 1919) was a Canadian physician and one of the "Big Four" founding professors of Johns Hopkins Hospital. Osler created the first residency program for specialty training of physicians, and he was the first to bring medical students out of the lecture hall for bedside clinical training. He has frequently been described as the Father of Modern Medicine and one of the "greatest diagnosticians ever to wield a stethoscope". Osler was a person of many interests, who in addition to being a physician, was a bibliophile, historian, and author. Outside of medicine, he was passionate about medical libraries and medical history and among his achievements were the founding of the History of Medicine Society, at the Royal Society of Medicine, London. In the field of librarianship he was instrumental in founding the Medical Library Association of Great Britain and Ireland, the (North American) Association of Medical Librarians (now known as the Medical Library Association) with three others, including Margaret Charlton, the medical librarian of his alma mater, McGill University. He left his large history of medicine library to McGill, where it continues to exist as the Osler Library. Perhaps Osler's greatest influence on medicine was to insist that students learn from seeing and talking to patients and the establishment of the medical residency. The latter idea spread across the English-speaking world and remains in place today in most teaching hospitals. Through this system, physicians in training make up much of a teaching hospital's medical staff.