By Victor S. Sierpina
Sir William Osler was one of the founding fathers of modern medical education. His life and work is a role model for every physician. Though he humbly admitted that he started in life “with just an ordinary stock of brains,” his lifelong discipline and system of study and research made him one of the finest physicians of his time and of all times.
In addition to deep knowledge of the subject of medicine allowing him to write the first comprehensive textbook of internal medicine, he was a gifted and innovative teacher. He personally performed over a thousand autopsies, barehanded as they did in those days, to deepen current knowledge of the pathology and physiology of disease. While at Johns Hopkins Medical School, he helped found the structure of contemporary medical education that has endured for nearly a century after his death. He prompted students to develop a consistent system of regular study to digest usable amounts of knowledge and likened cramming before examinations to trying to eat more than you can absorb.
In addition to his astute clinical, observational, and diagnostic reasoning skills, he emphasized the humanistic side of medicine. He taught students that the core of empathy with the patient is, “putting yourself in his place” and attempting to enter the mental space of the patient while offering “a kindly word, a cheerful greeting, the sympathetic look.”
He sometimes shocked contemporaries by his casual, playful nature and was well known for his affection for children with whom he was known to get down on the floor and play. He honored and trusted his medical students and gave them a key to his home so they could browse his extensive library. That would be like giving someone your email password these days.
Osler also excelled well beyond medicine. He moved far from his humble birth in a pastor’s home in provincial Canada to become a man of the world, welcomed in the great cities, universities and capitols in Europe and North America. He found time amid his medical focus to be schooled in literature, the arts, philosophy and religion. His perspectives and insights are reflected in his writing and public speeches showing how broadly based was this Renaissance-man’s education. His work is salted through with allusions to literature, poetry, music, the Bible, Shakespeare, classic mythology — in other words, the universal experiences of mankind. These all helped him to more deeply understand and appreciate the human condition. Such an education would likewise benefit today’s healers.
His writings are inspiring, and I particularly relished this passage on The Master-Word. While written to encourage medical students to develop a system of study and practice to excel in their profession, it is equally applicable to any field of life endeavor.
“I propose to tell you the secret of life as I have seen the game played, and as I have tried to play it myself … Though a little one, the master-word looms large in meaning. It is the open sesame to every portal, the great equalizer in the world, the true philosopher’s stone, which transmutes all the base metal of humanity into gold. The stupid man among you it will make bright, the bright man brilliant and the brilliant student steady. With the magic word in your heart, all things are possible, and without it all study is vanity and vexation. The miracles of life are with it: the blind see by touch, the deaf hear with eyes, the dumb speak with fingers. To the youth it brings hope, to the middle-aged confidence, to the aged repose. True balm of hurt minds, in its presence the heart of the sorrowful is lightened and consoled. It is directly responsible for all advances in medicine during the past 25 centuries … And the master-word is Work, a little one, as I have said, but fraught with momentous sequences if you can but write it on the tablets of your hearts, and bind it upon your foreheads.”
Some further Osler notable quotables:
“To serve the art of medicine as it should be served, one must love his fellow man.”
“Care more particularly for the individual patient than for the special features of the disease.”
“Kindliness of disposition and gentleness of manner are qualities essential in a practitioner … The rough voice, the hard sharp answer and the blunt manner are as much out of place in the hospital ward as any lady’s boudoir.”
“The quiet life lived in day-tight compartments will help you to bear your own and others’ burdens with a light heart.”
“Your business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.”
“..fair average abilities, well-used, carry their owner above the heads of abler men — the genius rarely makes a successful practitioner; but the careful hard-working student. with plodding pains. develops elements of lifelong success …”
UTMB has a number of organizational initiatives that venerate and carry forward Osler’s work and his ethics and values. These include a group of distinguished faculty who are members of the Osler Scholars, Osler Student Societies, and Osler Student Scholars and scholarships.
Thanks to the generous gifts of Dr. John P. McGovern, it is fitting that the humanistic, holistic and principles of the practice of medicine at its finest are espoused and carried forward in our contemporary age.
Dr. Victor S. Sierpina is the WD and Laura Nell Nicholson Family Professor of Integrative Medicine and Professor of Family Medicine at UTMB.