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Sir William Osler, 1st Baronet ( 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. BIOGRAPHY He was born in Bond Head, Canada West (now Ontario ), raised largely in Dundas, Ontario . He received his high school education at Trinity College School . Subsequently he studied and taught at McGill University in Montreal , Quebec , where he obtained his medical degree in 1872 . It is here that he created the first formalized Journal Club . In 1884 he was appointed Chair of Clinical Medicine at the University Of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia ; in 1889 he became the first chief of staff at Johns Hopkins Hospital , and in 1893 one of the first professors of medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore . In 1905 he was appointed to the Regius Chair Of Medicine at Oxford , which he held until his death. Osler was created a Baronet in 1911 for his great contributions to the field of medicine. Osler was a prolific author and a great collector of books and other material relevant to the History Of Medicine . His most famous work is the ''Principles and Practice of Medicine'', which appeared in many editions and translations for over 50 years. An inveterate prankster, he wrote several humorous pieces under the pseudonym Egerton Yorrick Davis, even fooling the editors of the ''Philadelphia Medical News'' with a report on the supposed phenomenon of '' Penis Captivus ''. He willed his library to McGill University where it forms the nucleus of McGill University's Osler Library Of The History Of Medicine , which opened in 1929 . Sir William and Lady Osler's ashes rest there among his beloved books. Perhaps Osler's greatest contribution to medicine was the establishment of the medical residency program, an idea that spread across the country and remains in place today in most training hospitals. Through this system, doctors in training make up much of the Hospital's medical staff. The success of his residency system depended, in large part, on its pyramidal structure with interns, fewer assistant residents and a single chief resident, who originally occupied that position for years. Osler also instituted another first by getting his medical students to the bedside early in their training; by their third year they were taking patient histories, performing physicals and doing lab tests examining secretions, blood and excreta instead of sitting in a lecture hall, dutifully taking notes. He diminished the role of didactic lectures and once said he hoped his tombstone would say only, "He brought medical students into the wards for bedside teaching." He himself liked to say, "He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all." Throughout his life Osler was a great admirer of the 17th century physician and philosopher Sir Thomas Browne . In 1994 he was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall Of Fame . EPONYMS Osler lent his Name to a number of diseases and symptoms.
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