Word: osiers
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Medical editors frown upon literary graces as Puritans frowned upon dancing. Almost all medical reports are warty with Greek and Latin jargon: "Etiologic factors" for "causes," "acute coryza" for "the common cold," "osseous structures" for "bones." Yet the modern physician's bible, Sir William Osier's Principles and Practice of Medicine, is a model of warm and lucid prose-human language conveying the fears and torments of sick human beings...
Even doctors, some of whom have been "terrible sufferers," find it hard to speak of gout with a straight face. Some, like their patients, pride themselves on their virile infirmity. Osier quotes approvingly Germany's Willibald Pirkheimer (translated into English in 1617) : "I take no pleasure," he wrote, "in those hard, rough, rusticke, agresticke kind of people who are never at rest, but ... are moyling and toyling, do seldom or never give themselves to pleasure, do endure hunger, which are content with a slender diet...
...Cushing, reticent and aloof, made few friends. He lived for medicine. But at the Hopkins he forged a lifelong bond with Hopkins Founders William Stewart Halsted and William Osier, both much older than he. After Sir William Osier's death, in 1919, Lady Osier persuaded Dr. Cushing to write her husband's biography. Dr. Cushing reluctantly set to work, appropriated an enormous laundry table from the cellar, piled it high with boxes full of notes, set about retrieving Dr. Osier's myriad postcards (he rarely wrote letters). Much to the surprise of Dr. Cushing and his family...
Early in this century Sir William Osier, patron saint of modern medicine, discovered that nearly 53% of pneumonia fatalities occurred among drunkards. Two years ago young Dr. Kenneth LeRoy Pickrell of Johns Hopkins Hospital, stimulated by Osier's statistics, set out to learn the exact manner in which alcohol lowered resistance. Last week, after a score of different experiments on 175 rabbits, he reported in the Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin the first satisfactory explanation for this important pathological phenomenon...
...while he still was Harvard's brilliant medical light, Dr. Harvey Williams Gushing was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of his great good friend, the late Sir William Osier. The award saluted a rarity, an able doctor who was also an able literary craftsman. The salute also confirmed Dr. Cushing's reputation as a thoroughgoing medical historian...