Page:Critical Woodcuts (1926).pdf/248

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

research who will not desire to own the book—no owner would lend it long enough to read it through—and repeatedly to make his way through its fourteen hundred inspiring and richly informative pages.

The author, whose name appears on the title-page without any professional identification or display of learned letters, has a record rather strikingly like that of Osler: nine years on the Johns Hopkins staff as associate surgeon, three years of the period with Osler in charge; professor of surgery at Harvard since 1911; in charge of a base hospital and consultant in France during the war, with a colonelcy in the Medical Corps of the U. S. A.; many foreign honors, membership in British and French medical associations, and enormous acquaintance with the history, bibliography and personnel of his profession.

Without using the first personal pronoun, Dr. Cushing keeps his eye on the object from first to last. He has made his imagination work to realize every step of Osler's career from the Canadian backwoods to the Regius professorship.

The prime question about a distinguished man is how he got his start. Introducing Osler in 1909 at a session of the London School of Tropical Medicine, the American Ambassador, Whitelaw Reid, presented the speaker as "a very excellent example of what the States could do with a Canadian when caught young." That was a fair ambassadorial crack, but Dr. Cushing's admirable opening chapters on the birth and upbringing of our physician do not justify it. The States were more indebted to Osler than Osler to the States. What the Johns Hopkins got when it called this Canadian was a physician who had supplemented his training in the best Edinburgh traditions by ac-