XVII William Osler: the High Calling of Medicine IN the house of letters there are many delightful mansions; but, according to my own taste and judgment, the first competent, comprehensive biography of a great contemporary is the most important and the most stimulating form of current literature. It presents what our society needs above everything else: an objective made visible, an ideal made contagious by realization. If wishing could do it, I would wish "The Life of Sir William Osler" into the hands of every man, woman and child who reads the six best-selling novels. When one comes to think of it, there are excellent reasons for bringing the layman in at this point. The lay public often fears the lawyers, sometimes shuns the clergy, but, through thick and thin, it clings to the physicians. Year after year we laymen furnish them "laboratory material." We are intensely interested in the outcome of their experiments. In the long run from the cradle to the grave we are certain to have been many times in debt, and indebted, to them. Furthermore, Dr. Osler, though a most resolute and devoted physician, was much else that interests the laity. In his earlier years he was a passionate student of the fundamental sciences, and as an Oxford professor he was a propagandist for scientific studies W Osler in the last refuge of the classics. He was a great teacher and a persuasive speaker on the regimen of the student and on the arts of instruction. He was a medical publicist and statesman with messages of the highest importance to mayors, town meetings and that miscellaneous rabble out of which that noble force known as Public Opinion proceeds. He was a bookman, an enamored bibliographer, a curator of the Bodleian, a director of the Oxford Press, a founder, patron and promoter of libraries in England, Canada and the United States. Besides all this, he was a beautiful and lovable character, completely possessing several great and simple virtues which drew men to him and held them. As for the medical profession, I fancy not much inviting will be required to bring it to this sumptuous feast. The head of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, the author of "The Principles and Practice of Medicine" and "Æquanimitas," touched it at all points. Wherever he touched it, he glorified it. He loved every honest medical man from Galen, Hippocrates and Avicenna to his Alabama student, and if he had enjoyed the leisure of Methuselah he would have delivered an address or have erected a monument in honor of every one. Fearful of specialism, he loved the whole range of pathology, and in the laboratory or the clinic or in strategic counsels with his colleagues, he had a hand in the fighting against all the major plagues of mankind. The story of his life must appeal to his old comrades as Grant's "Memoirs" appealed to the veterans of the Civil War. Nor can one conceive of any intelligent and aspiring young physician, surgeon, nurse, trustee of a hospital, or any one earnestly concerned with public health or medical education and 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.