Book Reviews and Journal Notes

A Way of Life and Selected Writings of Sir William Osler. New York, Dover
Publications, 1958. $1.50.
OSLER IN PAPERBACK

For the Osler number of the Bulletin of John Hopkins Hospital of July 1919
Basil L. Gildersleeve, the great classical scholar, contributed this poem "On a
Portrait of Sir William Osler, Bart.":
William the Fowler, Guillaume l'Oiseleur!
I love to call him thus and when I scan
The counterfeit presentment of the man,
I feel his net, I hear his arrows whir.
Make at the homely surname no demur,
Nor on a nomination lay a ban
With which a line of sovran lords began,
Henry the Fowler was first Emperor.

Aesculapius was Apollo's chosen son.

But to that son he never lent his bow,
Nor did Hephaestus teach to forge his net;
Both secrets hath Imperial Osler won.
His winged words straight to their quarry go.
All hearts are holden by his meshes yet.
If these words reflect the tremendous influence of Osler on his medical con-
temporaries, times change, and Sir Geoffrey Keynes, himself a physician, now
writes:
But the generation that knew Osler is quickly passing, and with it must pass the memory of
his living presence. His text-book of Medicine, although it can remain a pattern of style in
medical writing, like every other text-book, cannot, with the advances of the Art and Science,
be for long an active influence. Osler's memory cannot, indeed, be served better than by a
reading, or a re-reading, of his addresses and essays.
To perpetuate this memory a committee of the Osler Club of London edited
as a centenary tribute, with the help of Dr. W. W. Francis, the Selected Writings
of Sir William Osler, published by the Oxford University Press in 1951. The
committee consisted of Drs. W. R. Bett, W. J. Bishop, A. W. Franklin, J. F.
Fulton, R. H. Hill, G. L. Keynes, M. J. Linnett, and A. M. Miiirhead. Their
aim was to present not Osler the pathologist or clinical professor, but their
patron saint as essayist and historian telling of his concern with the history of
medicine and of medical men and of his love of books. As the author myself of
214
 BOOK REVIEWS AND JOURNAL NOTES 215

Sir lWilliam Osler: Historian and Literary Essayist (Detroit, Wayne University
Press, 1951), I cannot praise too highly this contribution to Osleriana.
Preceded by an appreciative introduction by Sir Geoffrey Keynes, the sixteen
essays in the book show the breadth of his interests, the charm of his literary
style, and the power of his convictions: "Creators, Transmutors, and Trans-
mitters," "The Old Humanities and the New Science," "Books and Men,"
"Sir Thomas Browne," "Guy Patin," "Robert Burton," "Michael Servetus,"
"William Beaumont, a Backwood Physiologist," "The Young Laennec,"
"Letters to My House Physicians," "The Student Life," "Teaching and Think-
ing," "The Growth of Truth," "A Way of Life," "Illustrations of a Bookworm,"
and "The Collecting of a Library."
Although I should have liked seeing "Aequanimitas," "Man's Redemption
of Man," "An Alabama Student," "Thomas Dover," "John Keats, the Apoth-
ecary Poet," and "Science and Immortality" among the pieces, perhaps for
personal reasons, one cannot have everything in 278 pages.
The first essay in the book, written for a Shakespeare exhibition in 1916, is
hard to come by, and his three letters to his house physicians describing his
1890 visits to continental hospitals and towns are collected for the first time.
"The Student Life" and "A Way of Life" are his best known addresses; the
Browne and Burton essays are on two English literary greats who were Osler's
lifelong companions; and the beautifully written paper on Servet the victim of
Calvin has always been a particular favorite of mine.
Now through a special arrangement with the Oxford University Press, this
collection has been reprinted from the British sheets with a new title, A Way
of Life and Selected Writings of Sir William Osler, by the Dover Publications of
New York in a paperback edition for $1.50. The bastard title and title page are
ill-designed (the type far too large), but the paper is of good quality, the binding
sound, especially so for a paperback, and the covers are attractive.
Osler in paperback seems to me a publishing event. For one who came in
contact with him through An Alabama Student and Harvey Cushing's great
biography and felt his influence, I believe that such an edition-easily available
and at a low price-should have a better chance than before of getting to those
for whom such writing was meant. In choosing "The Student Life" for an
anthology many years ago, the late Christopher Morley wrote:
Only our medical friends have a right to speak of the great doctor's place in their own
world; but one would like to see [Osler's] honorable place as a man of letters more generally
understood. His generous wisdom and infectious enthusiasm are delightfully expressed in
his collected writings. . His lucid and exquisite prose, with its extraordinary wealth of quo-
tation from the literature of all ages, and his unfailing humor and tenderness, put him in the
first rank of didactic essayists ... Rich in every gentle quality that makes life endeared, his
books are the most sagacious and helpful of modern writings for the young student. As one
w ho has found them an unfailing delight, I venture to hope that our medical confreres may
not be the only readers to enjoy their vivacity and charm.
216 BOOK REVIEWS AND JOURNAL NOTES

Of this value to the student, others have said much the same thing, though in
a broader way. For example, this remark by Sir Authur i'MacNulty, which Sir
Geoffrey quotes from the Cushing life of Osler:
He advanced the science of medicine, he enriched literature and the humiianities; yet indi-
vidually he had a greater power. He became the friend of all he met-he knew the workings
of the human heart metaphorically as well as physically. He joyed with the joys and wept
with the sorrows of the humblest of those who were proud to be his pupils. He stooped to
lift them up to the place of his royal friendship, and the magic touchstone of his generous
persoriality helped many a desponder in the rugged paths of life. He achieved many honours
and many dignities, but the proudest of all was his unwritten title, "The Young Man's Frien(l. "
Osler in paperback can give the student something he can get rarely and
often with difficulty elsewhere: inspiration for the classics, a feeling for the
humanities, and the beauty of literature, and the relationship between science
and philosophy and history. As the study of medicine-and indeed every other
profession-gets more and more complex and vast and the students become
involved in their immediate course and laboratory and clinical details, some-
thing gets lost. It is this something that Osler in this little book of essays can
give them. I should like to see this volume as "required reading" for medical
students if it weren't for the onus of "required."
For years Eli Lilly and Company gave to medical graduates in this country
copies of Osler's A equanimitas With other Addresses to Medical Students, N\-urses
and Practitioners of Medicine. May I suggest, along with Sir William's one-page
list of a "Bed-Side Library for Medical Students," now appended to the
A equanimitas volume, that some such organization as the Lilly Company give
the new M.D.'s copies of the Dover Publication's A Way of Life and Selected
IVritings of Sir William Osler? The profession will surely be the better for a
wide reading of this Osler in paperback.
WILLIAM WHITE, PH.D.
Detroit, Michigan

DENTON, GEORGE B. The Vocabulary of Dentistry and Oral Science. A Manual

for the Study of Dental Nomenclature. Chicago, American Dental Association,
Bureau of Library and Indexing Service, 1958. vii, 207 p. $4.00.
In the foreword of Denton's extraordinary standard work on dental nomen-
clature, Donald Washburn describes the development of this special field whichl
has been the concern of the American Dental Association for more than eighty
years. The first notable result of the intention of the American Dental Associ-
ation was the report of G. V. Black on the terminology of dental anatomy and
cavity preparation which had been presented before the Columbian Dental
Congress in 1893. Nearly half a century later, in 1937, a glossary of terms was
prepared by a Committee of the A.D.A. under the leadership of L. Pierce
Anthony which had worked on this task for 15 years. After another decennium