The Great American Doctor

Abstract Osler’s first private patient in Baltimore was an important elderly gentleman, a Hopkins trustee perhaps. Osler thought he felt a pelvic tumor, diagnosed it as an inoperable sarcoma, ‘and in as gentle a way as I could, told his wife, and advised that a surgeon see the case.’ The surgeon came the next day, drained the patient’s distended bladder with a catheter, and thus disposed of the ‘tumor.’ Osler used the embarrassment as an object lesson in his teaching. Otherwise, his private practice flourished. Consultations grew steadily in Baltimore until by the mid-90s he was seeing all the private patients he could handle and had to turn down an increasing number of requests (including, it is said, a man who then came back and read the Hippocratic Oath on his doorstep). He was consulting physician to the huge extended Osler family, to all his old friends back in Canada, to the students, nurses, doctors and their relatives at Hopkins, to the elite of Baltimore, to congressmen and several denizens of the White House, and to cases that interested him up and down the eastern seaboard and as far west as Wisconsin and Iowa.