William Osler

Sir William Osler (July 12, 1849 - December 29, 1919) was a Canadian physician. He has been called one of the greatest icons of modern medicine, the Father of Modern Medicine, which is what he himself considered Avicenna to be.

He was born in Bond Head, Canada West (now Ontario) and studied at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, where he obtained his medical degree. Later in his life he went south to Philadelphia and was appointed Chair of Clinical Medicine in the University of Pennsylvania. In 1889 he became the first Professor of Medicine in Johns Hopkins University. He later moved to England in 1905 and pursued his career as the Regius Chair of Medicine at Oxford, which he held until his death. Osler was named a baronet in 1911 for his great contributions to the field of medicine.

Osler was a great collector of books relevant to the history of medicine. After his death, his collection formed the nucleus of McGill University's Osler Library of the History of Medicine, which opened in 1929.

Throughout his life Osler was a great admirer of the 17th century physician and philosopher Sir Thomas Browne.

Osler lent his name to a number of diseases and symptoms.

• Osler's sign is an artificially high blood pressure reading due to atherosclerotic arteries.
• Osler's nodes are painful indentiations on the muscular pads of hands and feet, a symptom of infectious endocarditis.
• Rendu-Osler-Weber disease (also known as hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia) is a syndrome of multiple vascular malformations on the skin, in the nasal and oral mucosa, in the lungs and elsewhere.
• Osler-Vaquez disease (also known as Polycythemia vera)