"It is much more important to kow what sort of patiet has disease, ..." - William Osler

"It is much more important to kow what sort of patiet has disease, than what sort of disease a patient has"

  - William Osler [The Adult Spine, Priciples ad Practiice]


William Osler From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Osler

Sir William Osler, 1st Baronet (/ˈɒz.lə/, July 12, 1849 – December 29, 1919) was a Canadian physician and one of the four founding professors of Johns Hopkins Hospital. Osler created the first residency program for specialty training of physicians, and he was the first to bring medical students out of the lecture hall for bedside clinical training.[1] He has frequently been described as the "Father of Modern Medicine".[2] Osler was a person of many interests, who in addition to being a physician, was a bibliophile, historian, author, and renowned practical joker.

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Perhaps Osler's greatest contribution to medicine was to insist that students learn from seeing and talking to patients and the establishment of the medical residency. The latter idea spread across the English-speaking world and remains in place today in most teaching hospitals. Through this system, doctors in training make up much of a hospital's medical staff. The success of his residency system depended, in large part, on its pyramidal structure with many interns, fewer assistant residents and a single chief resident, who originally occupied that position for years. While at Hopkins, Osler established the full-time, sleep-in residency system whereby staff physicians lived in the administration building of the hospital. As established, the residency was open-ended, and long tenure was the rule. Doctors spent as long as seven or eight years as residents, during which time they led a restricted, almost monastic life.

He liked to say, "He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all."[citation needed] His best-known saying was "Listen to your patient, he is telling you the diagnosis," which emphasises the importance of taking a good history.[2]

The contribution to medical education of which he was proudest was his idea of clinical clerkship – having third- and fourth-year students work with patients on the wards. He pioneered the practice of bedside teaching, making rounds with a handful of students, demonstrating what one student referred to as his method of "incomparably thorough physical examination." Soon after arriving in Baltimore, Osler insisted that his medical students attend at bedside early in their training. By their third year they were taking patient histories, performing physicals and doing lab tests examining secretions, blood and excreta.

He reduced the role of didactic lectures and once said he hoped his tombstone would say only, "He brought medical students into the wards for bedside teaching." He also said, "I desire no other epitaph … than the statement that I taught medical students in the wards, as I regard this as by far the most useful and important work I have been called upon to do." Osler fundamentally changed medical teaching in North America, and this influence, helped by a few such as the Dutch internist P.K. Pel, spread to medical schools across the globe.

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