Book Review
What Would Osler Read?
The great physician's reading list still inspires.
Book review by Charles R. Meyer, M.D.
Like sentries at the ready, my books surround my bed. Close to my head stand the yet-to-be-read corporals, barking the nightly command to open them. Across the room are rows of the read-but-forgotten sergeants, standing at attention and wondering if I’ll ever call on them again. And to the left stand the ageless generals, decorated by years of use and re-use who have earned my allegiance because of their wisdom and depth. Every reader has a list of generals, those books that penetrate their souls on first perusal and stay with them for years, books that mold their thoughts and even their character, books that matter to them forever. And every generation of readers seems to generate a different list. Sir William Osler, the father of modern internal medicine, Regents Professor of Medicine at Oxford, wily clinician and polymath, compiled a prodigious compendium of the important books in his life. Those books are surveyed in Osler’s Bedside Library: Great Writers Who Inspired a Great Physician.
Osler’s list reads like a list of “should have reads” or “am going to reads” for all dedicated readers, works that once formed the basis of a classical education but now are remembered only by those who can barely remember their own education and are thought best retired by those who tout more modern theories of learning. Not ready for retirement, says the editor of this anthology, cardiologist Michael Lacombe, M.D., who argues that the authors of these works are just as important in 2010 as they were in Osler’s time and that his book is “meant to pull you away from television, set aside that modern novel, and return to the classics as you have to admit you have always intended to do.” Osler’s top 10 list for physicians is imposing and at the same time alluring—with works by Plutarch, Shakespeare, Sir Thomas Browne, Montaigne, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Cervantes, Emerson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, plus the Old and New testaments. Twenty more have been selected to round out what Lacombe calls a person’s “inner education.”
Each author merits a chapter written by contemporary writers who tackle their job differently. Some, like McGill Professor of Medicine Maureen Rappaport, M.D., who analyzed Shakespeare’s sonnets, merely touch on Osler’s interest. Instead, she dissects the structure and exults in the beauty of Shakespeare’s lines. “Committing these lines to memory is of more use to a medical student than memorizing the Krebs cycle,” she argues. Others, like the University of Sydney’s Claire Hooker, Ph.D., who discusses George Eliot’s Middlemarch, look for what in the work attracted Osler. Hooker suggests it’s the likenesses between Eliot’s hero Dr. Lydgate and Osler: “Like Lydgate, Osler similarly harbored hopes of building a ‘reputation’ as a scientific discoverer; like Lydgate, he could not earn a living in research and had to integrate his intellectual ambitions with his professional life. And, although leaving the bench for the bedside initially depressed him, like Lydgate, Osler is known for his care for his patients as unique individuals.” Many of the contributors, such as Columbia University Professor of Medicine Rita Charon, M.D., Ph.D., mine the marginal notations made by Osler to glean his thoughts about a work.
Most revealing are the quotes from Osler himself about the physician authors in his inventory. About poet John Keats, who aborted his medical career to pen ageless lines during the last few years of his short life, Osler says: “Literature has often been enriched by those who have deserted medicine for the muses. But to drink deep draughts at Pierian springs unfits and when the thirst is truly divine should unfit a man for the worrying rounds of practice.” He goes on to name some of what might have been lost had Keats not abandoned medicine and concludes, “Happily, such men soon kick free from the traces in which the average doctor trots to success.” Yet somehow Osler himself seems to have been able to drink from those springs and still be a superb doctor. For although Osler was first a doctor inextricably wedded to his practice, his mistress was literature as he thought it should be for all physicians, a serious dalliance intended to nurture a complete person who also happens to practice medicine.
Encompassing Osler’s bedside library could be a lifetime project requiring sturdy bookshelves. Except for Shakespeare, my shelved generals don’t overlap with Osler’s choices. Driven by a peculiar yen to fill the holes in my education, I am tempted take a run at Osler’s line-up and see if they win a place among my most decorated. MM
Charles Meyer is editor in chief of Minnesota Medicine.