[1st Bart.]. British physician and professor of medicine, born at Bond Head, Canada, on the 12th of July 1849, the son of the Rev. F. L. Osler, a missionary. He was educated at Trinity College School, Port Hope, Trinity University, Toronto, and McGill University, Montreal, where in 1872 he took his degree of M.D. He then went to Europe and studied medicine in London, Leipzig and Vienna, afterwards returning to Canada, where he was appointed in 1874 professor of medicine at McGill University. From 1884 to 1889 Osler was professor of clinical medicine in the university of Pennsylvania, and from 1889 to 1904 professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University; it was during this period in the United States that his international reputation was made. In 1905 he was appointed regius professor of medicine at Oxford. In this position he greatly developed the medical school at Oxford, and used all his influence towards the furtherance of advanced research. While at Oxford he served as a curator of the Bodleian library, as a delegate of the University Press, and as one of the Radcliffe trustees. He was created a baronet in 1911, and died at Oxford on the 29th of December 1919. Sir William Osler was not only a great medical consultant, and one of the wisest advisers of his day on practical affairs of all sorts, but was the author of many medical works, of which the most important, The Principles and Practice of Medicine (1892; latest ed., 1916), has been translated into many foreign languages. See also “The Student Life.”
