A bedside library

 I shouldn’t have ended yesterday’s note on Sir William Osler without mentioning his bedside library.

In Osler’s day, most medical students didn’t get much of a liberal arts education. Osler urged his students to read for half an hour before bed and for a few minutes in the morning. Get the education of a gentleman, if not that of a scholar, he said.

Osler died in 1919. His language and views are perhaps dated. But my friend Melvyn, who was a professor of medicine at the University of Texas, went to school in the era when medical students began training after their junior year in college. They skipped their senior year. Melvyn regretted that he had missed all those electives in subjects that interested him: literature, history, music and art.

Long after he was a tenured professor, he enrolled in courses at two local colleges. When he was in his 90s, he mourned that he’d taken all the English courses in both catalogs.

Melvyn said most medical students are still deprived when it comes to the liberal arts. He often started a class at the medical school with a discussion about a novel. He wanted to make the point that doctors should be able to talk about all kinds of ideas with their patients. Patients are people, not cases, he said. Doctors should be able to have a conversation.

If you’re curious, Osler’s bedside library had 10 books: The Bible, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Melvyn loved Shakespeare, but his list would have been lighter on the classics and heavier  on the modern novel.

• Source: Sir William Osler, Osler’s “A Way of Life” & Other Addresses with Commentary & Annotations, ed. by Hisae Niki, Shigeaki Hinohara and Sigeaki Hinohara; Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001, p. 371.