The Anatomy of Deception - Lawrence Goldstone [141]
She refused.
“You don’t love me, Ephraim. You are fond of me, I know, and I think that you would be kind and generous to Samuel. But I’ve struggled too arduously to accept a proposal from a man who would have chosen another. Also, my work here in Philadelphia is far too important to me.”
My choice of Abigail over this exceptional woman was yet another of my mistakes that would have no remedy.
In the end, I put as much distance as I could between myself and Philadelphia, settling in the small but growing city of Seattle, Washington. Physicians were scarce and I was welcomed without question. There, I courted and married a lovely woman. She was not mercurial and intoxicating like Abigail Benedict, nor formidable and determined like Mary Simpson, but she is kind, gentle, and accepting of my faults. We have been married forty-one years, and have three sons, two daughters, eleven grandchildren, and, as of last year, a great-grandson. I will retire as a physician this year—my eyes and my hearing are not what they were—but the children’s hospital I helped found, the most progressive institution of its kind in the West, I am proud to say, will continue here under the guidance of others.
With age, I have come increasingly to gaze at progress from afar. Air travel astounds me. While my scientist’s mind can accept Bernoulli’s principle in theory, I will never consent to sit inside a metal tube shooting through the clouds with nothing to keep it from hurtling to earth except forward motion. My son George, however, flies often, and my grandson Ephraim, all of sixteen, insists that he will be a pilot. I am more sanguine about earthbound conveyance and love my Nash.
I followed Dr. Osler’s remarkable life almost to obsession. He took his position at Johns Hopkins and was so instrumental in altering the manner in which physicians viewed their work that his life could be considered the fulcrum upon which the science of medicine pivoted. During the next decade, he completed his textbook, Principles and Practice of Medicine, which is still the standard by which all similar works are judged. In 1892, Dr. Osler was named president of the American Pediatric Society. He has received honors and awards sufficient to fill a volume of their own.
In 1905, he left Johns Hopkins to accept the Regius Professorship of Medicine at Oxford University, the most prestigious medical appointment in the English-speaking world. At Oxford, although it seems impossible, his achievements were even greater than those in America. In 1911, he was knighted by the king, Edward VII.
Dr. Osler did indeed marry the widowed Mrs. Gross, and the couple had one son, Edward Revere. When young Lieutenant Osler was killed in Flanders in 1917, it broke the Professor’s heart. He died a mere two years later. He did, in fact, order a postmortem on himself and his prediction of what would be found—thoracic empyema, pus in the right pleural cavity, a massive pleural infection—turned out to be exactly correct.
In addition to his professional achievements, Dr. Osler amassed one of the most astounding personal libraries in the world, over eight thousand volumes, the majority devoted to the history of science and medicine, including the most exhaustive collection of material on Servetus ever compiled. He spoke of Servetus often, even using him as the subject of his annual address to the Johns Hopkins student body, and he was among the benefactors of a monument that was erected in Annemasse, France, just across the border from Geneva, where Servetus had been burned at the stake.
William Stewart Halsted remained at Johns Hopkins for the rest of his life. Although always a brilliant surgeon and teacher, he was responsible for few surgical innovations after the early 1890s. Perhaps morphia had sapped his genius. Still, it is fair to say that every great surgeon of the first three decades of this century