Some Pet Philosophies of the Famous
Physician Whose View on the Age-Limit
Is Not His Only Idea.
When Dr. William Osler admitted his belief that man is fit for creative
intellectual work only up to his fortieth year he gained an undeserved
reputation for grimness. The age-limit theory is but one of many that he
has formed on various subjects. In his book, "Counsels and Ideals," are
many genial expressions of a ripe observation. Here is his advice as to
"work":
How can you take the greatest possible advantage with the
least possible strain? By cultivating system. I say
cultivating advisedly, since some of you will find the
acquisition of systematic habits very hard. There are minds
congenitally systematic; others have a life-long fight
against an inherited tendency to diffusiveness and
carelessness in work.
To counteract "the murmurings and whimperings of men and women over the
non-essentials" he advises each of us to "consume his own smoke."
Things cannot always go your way. Learn to accept in silence
the minor aggravations, cultivate the gift of taciturnity,
and consume your own smoke with an extra draft of hard work,
so that those about you may not be annoyed with the dust and
soot of your complaints. More than any other the
practitioner of medicine may illustrate the great lesson
that we are here not to get all we can out of life for
ourselves, but to try to make the lives of others happy....
Courage and cheerfulness will not only carry you over the
rough places of life, but will enable you to bring comfort
and help to the weak-hearted, and will console you in the
sad hours when, like _Uncle Toby_, you have "to whistle that
you may not weep."
Of the end of life, speaking both as a physician and as a philosopher, he
says:
With what strife and pains we come into the world we know not, but it is
commonly no easy matter to get out of it, Sir Thomas Browne says; and,
having regard to the uncertainties of the last stage of all, the average
man will be of Caesar's opinion, who, when questioned at his last
dinner-party as to the most preferable mode of death, replied, "That which
is the most sudden."
I have careful records of about five hundred death-beds, studied
particularly with reference to the modes of death and the sensations of
the dying. The latter alone concern us here. Ninety suffered bodily pain
and distress of one sort or another, eleven showed mental apprehension,
two positive terror, one expressed spiritual exaltation, one bitter
remorse. The great majority gave no sign one way or the other; like their
birth, their death was "a sleep and a forgetting." The preacher was right:
in this matter man hath no preeminence over the beast--as the one dieth,
so dieth the other.