tific branches, the author has kept his ideas in every department of medicine abreast of the times.
As a practitioner the humanitarian side of the physician was fully as prominent as the intellectual. In the wards and among the out-patients, students were shown by example that qualities of the heart as well as those of the head are essential for the proper practise of medicine. Osier educated his patients more than he drugged them, many will agree, to their benefit. His private practise, confined to consultation, was small at first, but gradually assumed proportions which made it a burden. No small percentage of it consisted in the non-remunerated examination and treatment of physicians and members of the physician's families from all parts of the United States and Canada. He gained a great reputation in the profession for accuracy of diagnosis, and for acquaintance with the rarer syndromes, and while he was thought by some to be unduly pessimistic regarding pharmaco-therapy, it is. probable that his influence in combating its excesses has more than compensated for any inadequate appreciation he may have had of it. A foe to quackery and graft in all forms, Dr. Osier is also an enemy of the commercial spirit in medicine. Though he has attained a competence, he has reaped no financial reward commensurate with his services, nor does any man animated by similar ideals.
For those who know Professor Osier, the strength, charm and influence of his personality are fully as important as his scientific contributions. His example of fine living and high thinking, his hospitality, his sense of social duty. his devotion to the profession and all that pertains to its dignity and elevation, his sacrifice of comfort, time and energy for the upbuilding of medical libraries and medical societies, his interest in and support of humanitarian movements, including crusades against tuberculosis and anti vivisection, his generosity to, and sympathy with, struggling young medical men, especially those with scientific bent, his honoring of the master minds of medicine and medical heroes, his love of literature—especially of Plato and of Sir Thomas Browne—his fondness for old books, his humor, his philosophy of cheerfulness, his respect for age, despite newspaper calumnies of him, and, above all, his never-failing charity have had a deep influence upon those who have come in contact with him. By means of the recently published volume entitled 'Æquanimitas and other Addresses' and through his farewell message to the medical profession of this country,[1] some idea of this side of Dr. Osier may be gained, even by those who have not had the privilege of knowing him.
It must be pleasing to Americans to know that the portrait of Professor Osier recently presented to the University of Pennsylvania and the portrait of the group of four Johns Hopkins medical men, including him, painted this summer by Sargent, a gift from Miss Garrett to the medical school of Baltimore, will preserve for succeeding generations the features of this distinguished medical man, of whom the citizens of a country, his more than twenty years by adoption, are justly proud. The photograph here reproduced is an excellent likeness.
PROFESSOR WILHELM OSTWALD.
Under the new arrangement by which Harvard and Germany exchange professors, Wilhelm Ostwald, of Leipzig, is to lecture at Cambridge for half of the coming academic year. Ostwald was born in Riga, in 1853. At the University of Dorpat he studied chemistry and physics, receiving the first degree in 1875 and the doctor's degree in 1878. From 1875 to 1880 he was assistant in the physical laboratory. The salary was not large, and during part of this period Ostwald made both ends meet by giving lessons in music
- ↑ 'Unity, Peace and Concord,' J. Am. M. Assoc, Chicago, XIV., 1905, p. 365.
