Sir William Osler was a preeminent physician and medical educator who published more than a thousand medical, philosophical, and literary pieces and who spent his career at four universities, in three countries, and on two continents. In the course of teaching in Canada, the United States, and England, he collected several libraries of medical literature and the history of medicine, and his collection culminated in the works enumerated in the great Bibliotheca Osleriana (1929) that forms the nucleus of the Osler Library at McGill University in Montreal. His intense love of books and publishing, informal literary gatherings, public and published speeches, and writings on medical biography, bibliography, libraries, and literature continue to influence the humanistic ideals of many medical educators and physicians and to encourage their support of medical libraries.

Osler was born at Bond Head in the province of Ontario on 12 July 1849. His father, the Reverend Featherstone Lake...