Osler Who?

Wednesday, 10 March 2010 05:18

There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language

Osler Who?

Sir William Osler (1849-1919) is an international medical icon. He was born in Ontario, Canada and held senior positions at prestigious medical institutions in the US and UK, including Oxford and John Hopkins universities.

A prolific bibliophile, he catalogued thousands of books on the history of medicine. But his enduring legacy was ensuring students of medicine spent time with patients learning from them, rather than passing their time in a didactic setting.

He was also a notorious prankster and once submitted a case report to a publication under a rather cheeky pseudonym. A dictum he was known to impart stated: “He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all." Another well known aphorism conerning medical teaching is: "If you listen carefully to the patient they will tell you the diagnosis."

Many conditions and signs of disease have been named in his honour. Osler's nodes are painful, red, raised lesions found on the finger pulps, suggestive of the disease subacute infective endocarditis. They are caused by immune complex deposition and occur in 10–25% of endocarditis patients.

The inspiration for this site was the idea of a node being an information nexus for the digital age. Osler's love of cataloguing useful clinical insights is another feature that we hope will be evident in our site.

Links to other useful sites