may see William Osler, aged sixteen, in his top hat, as head prefect. At Weston he became the favorite pupil of a master with a passion for collecting, labeling and microscopically examining every conceivable specimen of "natural history." The passion was contagious. William caught it, became an infatuated microscopist and soon was so deeply absorbed in fresh-water polyzoa that he neglected his letters to his family. The influence of the master was reinforced by the medical director of the school, James Bovell. In 1868 William bought his first edition of Sir Thomas Browne's works, and began his life-long collecting of the "Religio Medici." Theology waned and medicine waxed. He went to McGill, where he received the best medical education to be had in Canada, and graduated with a special prize for a thesis "greatly distinguished for originality and research."
Perhaps the most significant thing that Osler did immediately after he was graduated was not to get married. Marriage he postponed till his forty-third year, in accordance with his advice to young medical students, that they should put their affections "on ice." Instead of getting married he went abroad for two years and studied with the masters in Europe and England, including seventeen months with John Burton Sanderson, whom thirty-four years later he succeeded as Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford. At the age of twenty-four he returned to McGill as Professor of the Institutes of Medicine, which position he held from 1874 to 1884. He was called to the Professorship of Clinical Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in 1884 and remained there till 1889. Then he accepted his post at the Johns Hopkins, and held it, in spite of all temptations, till 1905, when Oxford
