Page:Critical Woodcuts (1926).pdf/251

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called him. "Stick to your last" was a maxim that he preached and practised.

Dr. Cushing disclaims any attempt at a systematic "appraisal of his professional accomplishments." Osler's name is not identified with any of the great epoch-making discoveries of his period. He cannot be ranked with men like Virchow, Koch, Lister, and Pasteur. He was never, says Dr. Cushing, an "adept in bacteriological technique," and this defect in his training rather precluded his participating in the most important way in the main line of the scientific advance. In his farewell to his American colleagues he himself declared that he had had but two ambitions in his professions: first, to make of himself a good clinical physician, and, second, "to build up a great clinic on Teutonic lines, not on those previously followed here and in England, but on lines which have proved so successful on the Continent and which have placed the scientific medicine of Germany in the forefront of the world." His biographer, who makes some reference to his studies of a third element in the blood, "Osler's disease," etc., inclines to believe that his greatest services were performed as an inseminator of other minds and as a propagandist for public health, perhaps with special reference to his participation in the antituberculosis and antityphoid crusades. To this should be added the fact that the Rockefeller Foundation for Medical Research seems to have been directly inspired by the reading of his "Principles and Practice of Medicine."

Osler himself repeatedly denied that he had attained the objects of his ambition by any extraordinary faculty, and I don't think Dr. Cushing brings any extraordinary faculty to light. What one sees is a