But with all his abundant learning, his high spirits, his playful wit and love of a practical joke, he was incapable of offending. "If you can't see good in people see nothing." Charitable to a degree of others' foibles, even when he had to oppose or to fight in public for a principle he did so without leaving hurt feelings. This lay at the bottom of the great influence he exercised and the universal admiration felt for his character.
Probably no physician during his life has been so much quoted nor so much written about, and the chief periods of Osler's eventful and migratory career are too well known to need more than brief mention.
His father, a clergyman, Featherstone Lake Osler, with his wife, Ellen Pickton, left Falmouth, England, in 1837 and settled in the Province of Ontario. William, the eighth of their nine children, several of whom have become highly distinguished in Canadian affairs and in the law, was born July 12, 1849, at Bond Head. A graduate of Trinity College, Toronto, in 1868, he took his medical degree four years later at McGill University; then after two years of study abroad, returning to Montreal in 1874, he leapt into prominence as the newly appointed Professor of the Institutes of Medicine of his alma mater. A professor at twenty-five, in a chair which covered the teaching of pathology and physiology! And there followed ten years of active scientific work which laid the foundation for his subsequent eminence in his profession.
