There is the man, modest, grateful, appreciative. He attributes his material success to what others have done for him; his spiritual to his inheritancy. Had he added that, early in life, he had a vision and had striven heroically and worked laboriously to make it concrete for the benefit of mankind, and that extraordinary success had attended his efforts, he would have explained William Osler and his career.

What more need be said of his parents? They struggled successfully with the virgin soil in a primitive civilisation; the father ornamented his profession, and the mother fulfilled bounteously her destiny; she mothered eight children, four of whom became famous. The youngest, the subject of this biography, was in nowise remarkable as a child or boy:

And this he did to the day of his death.

He was steered into medicine by a strange mixture of scientific and pietistic ardour, James Bovell, and he studied and graduated at McGill Medical School, then a proprietary institution at the head of which was R. Palmer Howard, who by possessions and conduct influenced Osler’s life, for he said of him thirty-five years later: “I have never known one in whom was more happily combined a stern sense of duty with the mental freshness of youth.”

Osler went abroad and while increasing his knowledge of medicine laid the foundation of friendships and intimacies which years later, after he had become a famous teacher, facilitated a call to one of the most ornamental professorships in Great Britain. At twenty-eight he had a chair in his alma mater. In ten years he went to the top. Then began that series of calls to colleges and universities here and abroad which did not cease so long as he lived. He refused them all save those of the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins. In the former he stayed five years; in the latter fifteen. The temptation to respond favourably to the call from New York was very great, and greater still that from Edinburgh. But temptation for Osler was created to be resisted and there was a star that guided him as it guided the Wise Men of the East; he had but to follow it at night, and to be counselled during the day by the voice that once had counselled Socrates to reach his goal, viz., a true knowledge of himself and of his relations to his fellows, and, having reached it, to plant there his banner bearing the masterword in medicine: work. And he worked industriously, honestly, patiently, persistently.

Then came the call to Oxford. He had been in the harness actively for thirty years and the load had begun to drag; the burdens that he had not only willingly borne, but sought, had begun to bend him, and the unfinished literary material of many years clamoured for academic leisure and favourable environment. Oxford was the place and Osler was the very man! Going for good meant farewells, and out of one of them flowed a stream of notoriety which, for a time, threatened to drown him. He took leave of his students, colleagues and trustees in an address in which he discussed many problems of university life; particularly the danger of staying too long in one place, and the danger of not thrusting opportunities and responsibilities upon young men—and at this point he inadvertently remarked that he was not sure whether it was Anthony Trollope who suggested that there should be a college into which men of sixty retired for a year’s contemplation before a peaceful departure by chloroform, but there was much to be said in favour of it. The journalese rendering of this was “Osler recommends chloroform at sixty.” The storm gathered during the night. It broke in the East the following morning and by the evening it had spread throughout the country.

Every man and woman above sixty, or approaching it, would seem to have been affronted. Following the acrimonious discussions of the newspapers and the caustic cartoons, came the studied magazine articles proving that Enoch not only begot Methuselah after he was sixty, but walked with God; that Edison was in the heyday of his inventive activity; that Ford would practicalise flying after the chloroform age and that Clémenceau would save the world for democracy, perhaps for socialism. For a short time it looked as if the man without an enemy had lost his distinction. Again, his inner voice counselled him wisely. He did not attempt to explain; he could not be persuaded to refute the alleged statement. He had said the truth, and the truth sufficed William Osler to the end.

Of the many extraordinary things in Dr. Cushing’s adequate and appealing biography, none is more arresting than the account given of the birth of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and the part that Osler unconsciously played in it through his textbook. A young man who had access to the ear and the purse of John D. Rockefeller read it and was appraised of the fertile field awaiting planting by preventive medicine. The crops that have been harvested have been enormous, but they are as naught compared with those about to be garnered. How little it is generally appreciated that the colossal success of the Panama Canal was due as much to Gorgas as to Bunau-Varilla, and that Osler mediated his appointment to the Commission, and still less is known of the leading part Osler played in decapitating the gorgon typhoid fever in this country thirty years ago.

In England, Osler added to his cultural fame. He was made president of the Bibliographical Society, of the Ashmolean Society and, to cap them all, of the Classical Association, an honour which probably pleased him as much or more than any that had ever come to him. His address of acceptance, which embodied the whole spirit of his ideal, cost him the greatest labour of his life.

He found great joy in England, but he found also his greatest sorrow, for his son, a singular combination of his mother’s suaviter and his father’s fortiter was killed in the war. It did not kill Osler, it only killed his desire to live. Like his master, Sir Thomas Browne, he knew that oblivion is not to be hired and that the night of time suppresseth the day. He had lived every moment of his day, and every hour had been joyous save one, and he had never stopped to compute his felicities. He died as he had lived, like a marathon runner taking the hurdle.

Dr. Cushing’s biography is documented and detailed. It is the kind of biography of Osler that should exist, but there should be another made from it: the story of his life and the charm of his personality in narrative form followed by interpretation, characterisation and estimation. The present one will be received gratefully by his former pupils and colleagues, by his connections and associates, and by libraries; but the general reader, the one who wants to find out without reading hundreds of letters and without wading through 1,500 pages, what Osler was like, how he acquired primacy of the medical world, how he made himself a savant in literature while climbing to the top of his own profession, will seek a book where these are told informatively and entertainingly.

Such a biography of William Osler is bound to come in time. I venture to say that, when it does come, it will dwell at far greater length on the first half of his life. Those who knew Osler intimately will be astonished to find scant reference in Dr. Cushing’s book to the interesting Francis family, with whom he lived for so many years in Montreal, or to Nancy Astor, to whom he was legal guardian. There is almost no allusion to the playful side of his nature. To make a man into a saint, though he deserves it, does not always do him justice. William Osler had extraordinarily great qualities, but he was passionate in his likes and dislikes; he was often indiscreet, sometimes tactless to an unbelievable degree; he could not and would not suffer fools; and he exacted unqualified devotion, while preserving the freedom to go his own way. He loved practical jokes, but he was not at all happy when they were played on him. For all this, his feet were less of clay than those of most men. One of the great charms of Osler was that he was so human, and had so much love and understanding of humanity. It is as a man that his friends remember him, and it is as man and teacher that he shall be known to posterity.

Thirty-five years ago a Yankee wagonmaker, who had gone to California as a “forty-niner” and piled up a fortune, thought to immortalise his name by founding a university in Worcester, Massachusetts. This University should be a beacon light to other educational institutions, the object of their emulation and envy. Realising that he was lacking concrete pedagogical ideas, that he was devoid of, even antipathic to the principles of organisation and co-operation, and, at least, suspicious of his prejudices, Jonas Gilman Clark was persuaded by his counsellor and friend, the late Senator Hoar, to ask a young professor of psychology at Johns Hopkins University, a froward, self-confident, energetic man of promise, to plan and steer his venture. In the book which he called Life and Confessions of a Psychologist G. Stanley Hall tells us how he did it, and how his forebears and parents, his education and environment, permitted him to do it.

The story is an interesting one, and besides revealing the personality of Dr. Hall, as it was meant to do, no doubt that he might better understand himself, it throws a light upon the road that education has travelled in this country the past third of a century, a light that is illuminating though not dazzling. Stanley Hall often filled the lamp that generated it, and he swung the reflector with great skill. It is possible that the coming generation will say that he was the soundest psychologist of his time and that he broke more virgin soil than William James. He was an important and tireless worker in the field of pedagogy and he was extremely articulate. When he had passed his seventieth birthday he believed he would yet do “a few things which shall be better than I have ever yet been able to do.” He was one of those countless old men who go about repeating “I feel just as I did when I was forty.” It was not vouchsafed him to do any of them. Dr. Hall prided himself on being a straight, hard hitter. It pleased him enormously to be called “l’enfant terrible” of psychology. He had not always been able to speak out what had been in his mind, so he determined to do it in his book. There will be much diversity of opinion as to whether his reputation shall profit by his frankness.

Solomon was unquestionably right about many things, but Dr. Hall does not agree with him that humility should go before honour. “In the view I have attained of man, his place in nature, his origin and destiny, I believe I have become a riper product of the present stage of civilisation than most of my contemporaries; have outgrown more superstitions, attained clearer insights, and have a deeper sense of peace within myself. I love but perhaps still more pity, mankind, groping and stumbling, often slipping backward along the upward path, which I believe I see just as clearly as Jesus, or Buddha did.”

Though not for a moment would I appear to be either a champion of the use of the word “some” as an adjective, or an habitual user of it, I maintain that this is some statement. And why leave out Mohammed? Most of us, subject to hours and days of self-depreciation, inadequacy, unworthiness, will envy the self-satisfaction and self-complacency of this retired pedagogue. But in reality it does not suffice him: “As I advance in years there are few things I crave more, and feel more keenly the lack of, than companionship.” Even review of successes and contemplation of accomplishments do not shut out loneliness. There is no record that Jesus or Buddha was lonely.

From his earliest days Dr. Hall had what the Freudians call an inferiority complex. His childish self-consciousness, his juvenile aloofness, his mature bumptiousness, his senescent strenuousness all testify it. He became aware of it early in life and strove hard to overcome it. But like the fetters of Hephæstus it could neither be snapped nor loosened. Like them, its substance was as subtle as spider’s web and so cunningly contrived that none might see it even of the blessed gods. The statement quoted above may be construed as a last effort to extricate himself from the crafty net.

Dr. Hall was an ardent Freudian. “Nothing since Aristotle’s categories has gone deeper, or in my opinion is destined to have such far-reaching influence and results,” was the characteristic way he estimated the Freudian mechanisms. It mattered nothing to him that psychoanalysis and the study of the unconscious have made small appeal to the majority of trained psychologists of this or any other country. He attributed this to the prudish reluctance of his colleagues to face the momentous problems of sex life. They deny it; at least, his successor at Johns Hopkins, the professor at Columbia, the successor to William James at Harvard, and many others do. But the momentous problems of sex life did not balk Dr. Hall. He confessed to “a love for glimpsing at first hand the raw side of human life,” and he records the unique thrill he experienced at the numerous prize fights that he attended “unknown and away from home.” Moreover the seamy side of life seemed to him as valuable in some respects as the psychological laboratory. “In many American and especially in foreign cities, Paris, where vice was most sophisticated, London, where it was coarsest, Vienna, which I thought the worst of all, I found, generally through hotel clerks, a guide to take me through the underworld by night to catch its psychological flavour.” Some reader, low-minded and altogether contemptible, will be base enough to believe that there were other motives. It is a dangerous business anyway. Even Dr. Hall says he had a narrow escape once—his life, not his morals—in a den of Apaches in Paris. About the year Dr. Hall was called to Clark University, a clergyman in New York and a pious vice hunter visited such places and their motives for doing so were publicly questioned. The clergyman stood the shock, but his reforming friend went off his head. The reformatory urge, though not a fundamental one, often needs to be curbed, especially when it is entangled with a lust of curiosity.

Dr. Hall always had a weakness for new, bizarre, hybrid words, and he found difficulty in giving adequate vent to his emotions and cognitions in one language. Therefore one is not astonished to find the present volume constellated with French, German, and Latin words and phrases. He frequently speaks of his éclaircissements. He had various kinds: religious, social, political, economic, and even ethical. He has been very fond of giving aperçus, of being irreverent to the ipsissima verba; and he can never quite forget the hegira from Clark University after the visit of a certain Harper; he still hears the echo of the vox clamantis in deserto; and he will talk of the vita sexualis. It is to be presumed that any one lured by an autobiography of one of our leading educators will be able to translate these words. At any rate he is not likely to have any more trouble with them than he is with some of the sentences in English. For instance, the Professor, speaking of the necessity of educating the will and the heart as well as the intellect, says:

And again when saying a good word for the “seminary”:

Yes, indeed, but what will save the bromide, the smart Aleck, the hard-shelled—that’s the question. Is there any phenomenon or altitude that will accomplish that?

I have always understood it was Worcester, not Webster, who said: “It is I who am surprised; you are astonished,” when he returned home and saw his mother-in-law being kissed by the butler. I must have been mistaken, for Dr. Hall says that he was surprised and delighted when he got an invitation, after some lean years as a tutor, to deliver a course of lectures in Baltimore. The sensation of the butler and of Dr. Hall must have been the same, only on the reverse side of the shield.

Dr. Hall wrote this book to find out more about himself than he knew before. I hope he was successful. I know more about him than I did before, though I have been fairly familiar with his life in the open the past quarter of a century. He says many interesting things about himself. With some of them I find it hard to agree: for instance that he was a mixture of masochistic and sadistic impulses. It may be so, but they were not fifty fifty. One predominated.

Somewhere in the Tale of a Tub Swift says that happiness is a perpetual possession of being well deceived. Were it true, the writer of this autobiography rarely experienced happiness save perhaps in Berlin, where he learned “how great an enlightener love is, and what a spring of mind Eros can be.”