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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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