A well-told, enjoyable, enlightening—and much needed—biography of a giant of medical practice and education. William Osler (1849—1919) was a pastor’s son from rural Canada, the 8th of 9 children, who began his professional career as a pathologist; his career in medical teaching and clinical practice was eventually framed by stints at McGill, Johns Hopkins, and finally Oxford. By the time of his death, Osler was considered by colleagues and patients alike to be the greatest physician in the world; while at Hopkins he had revolutionized the clinical education of medical students; he wrote the groundbreaking text The Principles and Practice of Medicine, which finally went out of print in 1947, 16 editions later (and marked the last time such a wide-ranging tome had a single author), and was generally revered as the first great medical humanist. Osler’s previous biographer, the great neurosurgeon (and Osler contemporary) Cushing, delivered a plodding, admiring—and until now authoritative—account of Osler’s life and work in 1925. Medical historian Bliss (The Discovery of Insulin) here is able to sort through the mountains of material penned by Osler and his contemporaries to present a much more complete, clear-eyed, and ultimately admiring portrait of Osler, his work, and the times in which he lived. Bliss is able to sort out the cult-like devotion to Osler: In 1999, we can “rightly dismiss most of his medical writing as dated, of only historic or very specialized interest.” And yes, Bliss agrees, Osler can be viewed as a great medical humanist—’so long as it was remembered that the real Osler was also a rigorous disciple of science and the scientific method.” A clear picture of an extraordinarily curious, intelligent, kind, and humorous man emerges. Osler reportedly regretted that he wouldn’t be able to conduct his own post-mortem exam, “having taken such a lifelong interest in the case.” And along the way, readers will gain a clear picture of the Osler landscape: “the coming of modern medicine, the training of doctors . . . localism and holism in medical thought . . . feminism, humanism, science and the humanities, Victorianism, the rise of the United States, the North Atlantic cultural triangle” all come under Bliss’s lens. A first-rate biography of a towering medical influence.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1999
ISBN: 0-19-512346-8
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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