This is a collection of essays by Osler, considered by many to be the finest physician ever. He was a lover of books and a student of the classics. His lectures are brimming with erudition.
He has wonderful quotes from the sages of old and adds his own, such as "It is astonishing with how little reading a doctor can practise medicine, but it is not astonishing how badly he may do it."
Or, "But when one considers the unending making of books, who doesn't sigh for the happy days of that thrice happy Sir William Browne, whose pocket library sufficed for his life's needs, drawing from a Greek testament his divinity, from the aphorisms of Hippocrates his medicine, and from an Elzivir Horace his good sense and vivacity."
His favorite book of thousands was Religio Medici by Sir Thomas Browne, about which and whom he was a world authority. Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton was another favorite. The essay on Servetus is very interesting, and unsettling as our revered Calvin sentenced him to death.
The essay A Way of Life is revealing and instructive and evokes a past era of medicine and family life but has much to commend it, particularly living in the present moment, not the past or future.
A brief essay on the bookworm (insect) is a propos and clever.
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