Activities
Brief notices of the Society’s activities will be included on this page.
21 December 2024
On Saturday, 21 December 2024, WOSANZ commemorated the bicentenary of James Parkinson (1755-1824), who died in his 3 Pleasant Row London home from complications of stroke two-centuries prior. Following the fate of Parkinson’s legacy over the past two-hundred years, it was shown how the once little-known Hoxton apothecary would come to be the subject of multiple medical biographies. Parkinson’s death was summarily noted in local newspapers in 1824, and his most famous medical publication was omitted from contemporary bibliographies. But medical practitioners maintained an avid interest in Parkinson’s 1817 Essay on the Shaking Palsy, which continued to be highly regarded in professional circles for its clinical accuracy and clarity. In November of 1876, Jean Martin Charcot (1825-1893) conferred a sort of immortality onto James Parkinson when he suggested that “paralysis agitans” – which has the “disadvantage of worrying patients” – be renamed “Parkinson’s disease” “from the name of the English doctor who, in 1817, was the first to seriously draw attention to it.” The term was rapidly adopted across the continent, leading in turn to increased awareness of Parkinson’s Essay and later his biography. Fourteen biographical studies of James Parkinson – Boulger (1895), Rowntree (1912), Kelly (1938), Morris (1955), McMenemey & Critchley (1955), Yahr (1978), Tyler & Tyler (1986), Gardner-Thorpe (1987), Pies (1988), Morris & Clifford-Rose (1989), Stern (1990), Roberts (1997), Lewis (2017), Pasetti (2022) – written over 127-years tell the extraordinary life-story of this “modest, unassuming and warm-hearted” man who “practiced as a skillful and compassionate physician,” concerning himself closely with “the physical, social and moral welfare of his patients” (Stern, 1990). A respected parish doctor to the poor, socially conscientious political campaigner, and master collector of beautiful geological specimens, James Parkinson is depicted in his only known etching (pictured) as “the villager’s friend and physician” (Gardner-Thorpe, 1987), who was fond of giving domestic medical advice to his fellow citizens for healthy living. He “represented the ideal family doctor” (Roberts, 1997) who was driven by “above all, an empathy for and a desire to benefit mankind” (Yahr, 1978). His death at 69 from complications of a left middle cerebral artery stroke on Tuesday, 21 December 1824, was “most sincerely lamented by his family and friends” (Evening Mail, 1824), his son John writing to the Parish trustees shortly after: “With feelings of deep regret I have to announce to you the death of my much beloved and respected Father” (Morris, 1989).
6 July 2024
On 6 July 1924, the German neuropsychiatrist, Hans Berger (1873-1941), performed the world’s first ever electroencephalogram (EEG) recording on a 17-year-old frontoparietal craniotomy patient, whose cranial defect facilitated direct string galvanometry readings from clay electrodes placed over the scalp. After five years of refining the process through dozens of readings on his own scalp and his own son (Klaus), Berger finally published his observations on the “Elektrenkephalogramm” in 1929. Over many years of meticulous research, Berger progressively named the standard brain wave patterns in accordance with their respective frequencies (alpha a.k.a. Berger waves, beta, theta, and delta), demonstrated interictal, focal, and generalised seizure patterns, and noted the lack of electrocerebral activity in brain death. In 1938, he brought out his classical 136-page monograph On the Electroencephalogram of Man, by which time his contribution was widely acknowledged by international scholars. Berger was an isolated and reclusive researcher who was driven to study electrical brain wave activity after a near-death experience as a young cavalry officer in 1892. An unsolicited telegram asking about his health immediately after the accident – requested by “my sister, who was very close to me” – led him to search for an objective explanation for this instance of “spontaneous telepathy… at a time of mortal danger… as I contemplated certain death.” These same thoughts were on Berger’s mind not long before he made the fateful decision to hang himself in his former Jena clinic during a fit of clinical depression on 1 June 1941. It was a tragic end for the pioneer inventor of the “electroencephalogram” – the enduring legacy of this inquiring if dispirited, sensitive soul.
24 January 2024
On Wednesday, 24 January 2024, WOSANZ commemorated the world-renowned Australian obstetrician and gynaecologist, Elinor Catherine Hamlin (1924-2020), on the occasion of her 100th birthday. Born Elinor Catherine Nicholson, she graduated in medicine from the University of Sydney in 1946, before completing her internship at the St Joseph’s and St George Hospitals. She then took up an obstetrics residency post at Sydney’s famous Crown Street Women’s Hospital in 1948, where she first met and later married Reginald Henry James Hamlin (1908-1993), an enthusiastic teacher of obstetrics and superintendent at the hospital who supervised Crown Street’s world-famous eclampsia elimination campaign. A publication dispute about this study led the Hamlins to later settle in Adelaide, but both felt unfulfilled in their city hospital roles and actively sought to get involved in more charitable causes. In late 1958, they responded to an advertisement in the Lancet calling for a “Gynaecologist… to set up a school of midwifery for nurses in the Princess Tsehai Memorial Hospital in Addis Ababa.” The Hamlins were initially offered a three-year contract there but would end up spending the rest of their lives in Ethiopia. They were driven particularly to care for poor patients with the horrendous childbirth complication of obstetric fistula from untreated obstructed labour, a sadly not uncommon birth injury in rural Ethiopia. Owing to constant leakage of bladder and sometimes bowel contents, these patients are destined to a lifetime of loneliness and social exile. Catherine and Reg self-taught themselves fistula surgery to help these vulnerable women, and after fifteen years of operating, they inaugurated the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital in 1975 – then the only operating specialist fistula hospital in the world. Catherine ran the hospital on her own after Reg died in 1993 and spent the rest of her life campaigning for adequate maternal care in Ethiopia. With the help of generous donors, she was able to facilitate the establishment of five further Ethiopian fistula hospitals, a fistula rehabilitation centre, and a college for rural midwives, all of which remain operational to this day. Catherine was internationally honoured throughout her life for her extensive efforts to eradicate obstetric fistula. She was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize (1999 and 2014) and was made an honorary citizen of Ethiopia in 2012. In Sydney, she is specially commemorated on the waters of the city’s iconic inner harbour, where the ‘Catherine Hamlin’ city ferry (pictured) carries on her outstanding legacy in daily boat rides across “the finest harbour in the world.”
5 October 2023
On Thursday, 5 October 2023, WOSANZ commemorated the bicentennial anniversary of the first number of The Lancet journal which was originally issued in London under the anonymous editorship of Thomas Wakley (1795-1862) on Sunday, 5 October 1823. Wakley turned to medical journalism after a brutal assault on his practice and person in the wake of the 1 May 1820 public executions of the Cato Street conspirators, who had been planning to overthrow the British government in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. Not long after the attack, the physically and morally wounded Wakley decided to give up his practice and seized upon the opportunity to periodically publicise popular metropolitan hospital lectures and to articulate the medical profession’s need for reform. The name chosen for Wakley’s medical weekly was incisive – what better than a surgical “lancet” to “cut out the corruption in medicine” (Lancet, 2023). After briefly discussing the origins of modern printing, a broad summary of historical journals was given, with special reference to the earliest known scientific journals (Journal des sçavans, Philosophical Transactions; both founded in 1665) and the first medical periodicals [Thomas Bartholin’s Acta Medica et Philosophica Hafniensia (1673), Nicolas de Blégny’s Nouvelles Découvertes sur Toutes les Parties de la Médecine (1679), and the short lived English organ, Medicina Curiosa (1684)]. A selection of representative 18th and 19th century English medical journals were noted, with special reference to the Medico-Chirurgical Transactions which morphed into the still current Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine (now the JRSM) following the 1907 amalgamation of its parent society (The Medical and Chirurgical Society of London) with seventeen historical London specialty medical groups – this occurred on the instigation of William Osler. A look at some of the major articles from The Lancet archives over the past two centuries witnessed several significant contributions: Simpson’s discovery of chloroform anaesthesia (1847), Lister’s announcement of antisepsis (1867), Florey and Chain’s work on “Penicillin as a Chemotherapeutic Agent” (1940), Donald and colleagues’ original observations on diagnostic and obstetric ultrasound (1958), Teasdale and Jennet’s formulation of the Glasgow Coma Scale (1974), Marshall and Warren’s identification of “curved bacilli on gastric epithelium in active chronic gastritis” (1983), and the results of Beral and colleagues’ Million Women Study (2003); all of which were discussed with interest. Despite some political controversy, The Lancet would mature into one of the world’s premier medical journals and today continues to propagate a reformist agenda in the style of Thomas Wakley. In 1897, William Osler recognized the need for such a voice in medicine, as “not a few… men in high places… have lent the weight of a complacent conservatism to bolster up an ineffectual attempt to stay the progress of new ideas.” “The… life of Thomas Wakley is a running commentary on this spirit, against the pricks of which he kicked so hard and so effectually.”
10 August 2023
On Thursday, 10 August 2023, WOSANZ foundation members commemorated the historic Sydney physician and neurology enthusiast, George Edward Rennie (1861-1923), on the centenary of his death five weeks after a major stroke in July of 1923. George Rennie is said to have been “the first medical man in Australia to have taken a major and sustained interest in organic neurological disease” (Eadie, 2000). He had a stellar undergraduate career starting out at the University of Sydney, winning a whole host of prizes and academic awards before his graduation with a BA degree in 1882. He then moved to London to study at University College where he graduated in medicine with highest honours in 1887 and became the first ever Australian MD Gold Medallist of the University of London in 1888. He returned to England for his MRCP examination in 1899 and became one of very few Australian physicians to be granted the London FRCP in 1907. Rennie initially worked as an assistant pathologist and physician to the Sydney Hospital before commencing his career-long association with the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital (RPA) in 1892. He relinquished his Honorary Physician post there in 1899 to pursue further neurological studies at the National Hospital in Queen Square, London, but returned to the RPA Hospital for good in 1900, where he occupied increasingly senior posts until his retirement in 1921. Rennie took on a leading medical educational role in Sydney, presided over the NSW Branch of the British Medical Association in 1902, and edited the Australasian Medical Gazette for over 12 years (1902-1914). He authored many early and interesting articles on neurological disorders and was described by his contemporaries at the time of his death as “one of the leading authorities in diseases of the nervous system in his State, perhaps in Australia.” His 1923 obituaries in the Medical Journal of Australia and Sydney Morning Herald describe him as an indefatigable, kind, and unostentatious man, who served his local community as a deacon for twenty-one years. “A great congregation of grieving men and women” gathered at his graveside at the Waverley Cemetery in East Sydney when he was finally laid to rest. “He was,” to them, “a man of many sterling qualities” who was “beloved by all who came in contact with him.”
13 February 2023
On Monday, 13 February 2023, WOSANZ foundation members commemorated the iconic Sydney physician-bibliophile and clinician-historian, Dr Benedetto Haneman (1923-2001), on the occasion of his 100th birthday. At the age of four, Ben immigrated to Australia with his Jewish parents from Florence, Italy, and settled in close vicinity to Sydney’s St George Hospital (est. 1894), where he worked for almost fifty years as a generalist and gastroenterologist. A fine physician with an Oslerian orientation to medicine, Ben mentored generations of Australian doctors and students as inaugural Warden of Clinical Studies at St George. His deep-held humanism manifested in his love of medicine, people, and books on the professional front and his social advocacy and humour on the personal. Over his lifetime, he amassed an extraordinary library of some 15,000 volumes, and had the third largest collection of Don Quixote editions in the world, numbering 1,100 volumes in over 40 different languages. The latter collection was donated in 1997 to the New South Wales State Library, where the better part of our day was spent admiring rare and variegated printed editions of Don Quixote on display in the library’s Friend’s Room – including a remarkable 1947 Spanish miniature edition and an illustrated Japanese scroll printing. Afterwards, we viewed a pre-recorded 2009 series of lectures given at the library as A Tribute to Cervantes and Dr. Ben Haneman by his close friends and colleagues who had known him. The day ended with a visit to Sydney’s Rookwood Cemetery – the largest Victorian era cemetery in the world – where Dr Haneman was buried following his quite sudden death after collapsing in the State Library in December of 2001. “There need be no paradox between being both cultivated and competent” as a practitioner of medicine, Ben once stated; “Sir William Osler, in his turn, had played that role magnificently for Anglo-American medicine,” and Dr Benedetto Haneman, it might fairly be added, embodied Osler’s example in Australia.
10 February 2023
On Friday, 10 February 2023, WOSANZ commemorated the discovery of X-rays on the centenary of Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen’s (1845-1923) death from malignant bowel obstruction in his Munich home, aged 77. He was interred in the family plot at Giessen, a sight frequented by clinician-historians, and marked with floral centenary tributes on this special day (see above). A detailed summary of Röntgen’s life and work kickstarted the meeting, with a focus on his famous 8 November 1895 experiments at Würzburg University that led him to discover and name “A New Kind of Rays” which he called “X-rays”. It was through investigating the characteristics of cathode rays that Röntgen first noticed the unexpected fluorescence of a barium platinocyanide plate in the vicinity (appearing white to the colourblind Röntgen instead of the standard green). After excluding all possible sources of light in the laboratory, and determining the focus of activity to be the extremity of the cathode ray tube he was using, Röntgen demonstrated the extraordinary penetrating power of these rays and performed a number of experiments to show how they differed from cathode rays. It was six-weeks before he took a famous X-ray of his wife Anna Bertha’s (1839-1919) hand on 22 December 1895, and soon after announced his discovery in the Meeting Reports of the Würzburg Physical Medical Society. Despite their immediate clinical utility, the exact nature of x-rays remained unknown for many years. In 1909, Röntgen’s Munich colleague, Arnold Sommerfeld (1868-1951), demonstrated that x-rays were produced from the rapid deceleration of cathode rays, a process he called “Bremsstrahlung” (breaking radiation). Sommerfeld’s understanding was dependent on long-coming and successive advances in the science of electromagnetism, atomic theory, and quantum physics – a subject that was comprehensively reviewed in the second half of the meeting. X-ray images were produced around the world with remarkable rapidity in early 1896, and Röntgen was awarded the first ever Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery at a large and lavish 10 December 1901 ceremony celebrating great minds in Stockholm. It was a far cry for the little boy from Lennep, who was expelled from school in Utrecht, and spent many years navigating the academic hierarchy due to his lack of a high-school diploma. “Nature often reveals the most astonishing phenomena by the simplest of means,” Röntgen stated not long before his famous discovery of X-rays. “But these phenomena can only be recognized by persons who have sharp judgment and the investigative spirit,” he proclaimed, “and who have learned to obtain information from [Nature and experience], the teacher of all things.”
26 January 2023
On Thursday 26 January 2023, WOSANZ foundation members commemorated the bicentenary of Edward Jenner (1749-1823), the celebrated Gloucestershire family practitioner and English pioneer of smallpox “vaccination.” Jenner died in the early hours of 26 January 1823 after sustaining a debilitating stroke a day earlier, which left him immobile on the right side and insensible until the time of his death. His physician recorded that “the pupils of the eyes [were] contracted to a point, and unaffected by strong light,” indicating perhaps a hypertensive pontine haemorrhage. The padded chair in which Jenner died has been preserved in its original state and remains in the collection of South Kensington’s Science Museum alongside two-hundred-year-old locks of Jenner’s hair that were prepared shortly after his death. Jenner is best known today for experimentally proving “that the Cow-pox protects the human Constitution from the infection of the small Pox.” On 14 May 1796, he famously inoculated his gardener’s eight-year-old son James Phipps (1788-1853) with Cow-pox matter “taken from a suppurated sore on the hand of a dairy Maid” named Sarah Nelmes – a historical moment since depicted in various artworks including the above early 20th century oil painting by Ernest Board (1877-1934). Phipps was proven to be immune to smallpox when he was repeatedly “inoculated with variolous matter, but no sensible effect was produced on the constitution.” Jenner published these results in his famous 1798 Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae, a work that overshadowed his other important contributions, including his 1786 observations suggesting the coronary origins of angina pectoris, and his 1788 publication describing the early life behaviours of nested cuckoos, which had him elected a Fellow of London’s Royal Society. Jenner’s revolutionary work on smallpox led to the introduction of the term “vaccination” (from the Latin word for cow, vacca), and hopes that the disease may one day be fully eradicated. “To have anticipated such results from human agency, would at no remote period have been considered the most chimerical of all imaginations,” wrote Jenner’s obituarist and future biographer John Baron (1786-1851). “We have, nevertheless, seen them realized [and] the time in which they occurred, will for ever be marked as an epoch in the physical history of man.”
8 January 2023
In a small and quiet sea-side ceremony on Sunday, 8 January 2023, WOSANZ foundation members marked the bicentenary of Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), co-discoverer with Charles Darwin (1809-1882) of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Wallace independently formulated his views on natural selection in February of 1858 and communicated his ideas to Darwin who (like Wallace) had been working on the same subject for many years. On 1 July 1858, their joint contribution On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties was presented to the Linnaean Society of London, and Darwin’s Origins was promptly published in November of the following year. William Osler (1849-1919) considered Darwin’s and Wallace’s 1858 publication to be “the two most fruitful contributions to science made in the 19th century,” and acquired the original papers for his library a day after hearing Wallace speak in person at the Linnaean Society’s Darwin-Wallace celebration on 1 July 1908. Wallace collected over 125,000 “specimens of natural history” during eight years of fieldwork in Southeast Asia, noting the distinctive characteristics of local fauna on either side of a biogeographically significant boundary line (Wallace’s line). In 1869, he published his widely acclaimed two-volume text on The Malay Archipelago, a first edition copy of which was reviewed during our meeting. After noting certain remarkable natural colourations of selected local flora and fauna (a topic that interested Wallace), we set out for the pristine beaches of New South Wales’ Sapphire Coast, and watched our decade-old ‘Wallace centenary’ video on YouTube. Excerpts from Wallace’s masterwork – including his descriptions of various “birds of paradise” – were read on the beachside as we gazed into the vast and crystal-clear aquamarine waters of the Tasman Sea. Complementing these scenic views was the voice of the good naturalist, whose deeply humane and considered observations of native peoples led him to exalt “that natural sense of justice and [scrupulous respect] of his neighbour’s right, which seems to be, in some degree, inherent in every race of man.”
27 December 2022
On Tuesday, 27 December 2022, WOSANZ commemorated the bicentenary of Louis Pasteur’s (1822-1895) birth in Dole, eastern France, an anniversary that has been widely celebrated around the world. Surely the most well-known and distinguished French medical scientist of the past two centuries, Pasteur majorly influenced the development of modern medicine through foundational researches into germ theory and the invention of artificial vaccines. A detailed overview of Pasteur’s Life & Legacy opened the meeting, with a step-by-step review of his major discoveries, including i) molecular chirality, ii) the microbial nature of fermentation, putrefaction, and infectious diseases, and iii) the successful application of ‘vaccination’ to protect against deadly infections like anthrax and fowl cholera in animals, and rabies in human subjects. Despite a debilitating stroke in October of 1868, Pasteur persevered with his researches, accomplishing many of his greatest achievements long after this date. In November of 1887, he responded to an international advertisement offering a £25,000 GBP prize ($10,000,000 AUD today) to anyone who could demonstrate an effective biological remedy for Australia’s intractable rabbit plague problem. Chicken cholera was fatal to rabbits, and Pasteur’s nephew-in-law Adrien Loir (1862-1941) experimentally proved its effectiveness at Madamme Louise Pommery’s (1819-1890) rabbit infested vineyard estate at Reims in December of 1887. Loir and his colleagues were thence sent by Pasteur to Australia, where they engaged in Sydney with the 1888 Royal Intercolonial Rabbit Commission. In a short but scholarly (pre-recorded) contribution to the meeting, Tasmanian writer and historian, Stephen Dando-Collins (author of Pasteur’s Gambit), told of how the Commission was prejudiced against Pasteur and his colleagues from the very outset, and therefore did not end up awarding him the prize. But all was not lost. Loir helped to establish the Pasteur Institute of Australia for the development of anthrax and other livestock vaccines on Sydney’s Rodd Island; this helped to fund “the crowning work of Pasteur’s life” (as Osler called it) – the Institut Pasteur in Paris. These contributions are evident in Loir’s Australian scrap books, which were shown during the meeting alongside a recently-recorded video of Rodd Island. A captivating review of Adrien Loir’s remarkable life in many countries and subsequent professional exile in France followed. Delivered by our international guest, Professor Maxime Schwartz, the talk told of Loir’s valiant efforts to diffuse Pasteurian science and methods over five continents as he strove to walk worthily In the Shadow of Pasteur (1938). Louis Pasteur died in September of 1895 and was laid to rest in a beautifully decorated Neo-Byzantine crypt below the institute where he lived and worked for the last seven years of his life. “There are sermons enough for all the sons of Science, and her daughters too, in the marbles and mosaics of the Pasteur Chapel,” said Stephen Paget (1855-1926) in a touching 1910 statement written for The Spectator (and quoted by William Osler): “Yet, to me… all the adornments round his grave were not sufficient… For he was, it seems to me, the most perfect man who has ever entered the kingdom of Science.”
7 September 2022
On Wednesday, 7 September 2022, WOSANZ members commemorated the centenary of the distinguished American surgeon, William Stewart Halsted (1852-1922), who died one hundred years ago “of pneumonia, after an operation for stone in the ampulla of Vater” (W.R. Bett). Halsted is best known today for introducing local anaesthesia (using cocaine) and rubber gloves into general surgery – the latter for the hands of his favoured scrub nurse Caroline Hampton, whom he later married. To practicing surgeons, he is the deviser of a revolutionary philosophy of ‘safe surgery,’ stressing the meticulous and gentle handling of tissues during operations to help maximise healing. Halsted’s radical mastectomy operation aimed to surgically cure breast cancer in a pre-chemotherapy era, and his revised inguinal hernia operation improved contemporary complication rates. In 1882, he performed the first open cholecystectomy in the United States – a 2am procedure on his own mother in the home kitchen – and in 1887 he introduced the submucosal intestinal suture, a crucial development in the field of gastrointestinal surgery. On the recommendation of Osler and Welch in 1890, Halsted was appointed the inaugural Surgeon-in-Chief at the Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, where he formalised America’s first formal surgical residency training program and tutored distinguished surgeons like Harvey Cushing (1869-1939) and Hugh Young (1870-1945). His own substantial contributions to surgery were achieved under the significant handicap of a cocaine and morphine addiction which he had unwittingly acquired during his earlier investigations into local anaesthesia. He strove hard to overcome these addictions, but as William Osler declared in his Inner History of Johns Hopkins (published 1969): “He had never been able to reduce the [morphine] to less than three grains daily.” Halsted’s “high standard” was nonetheless “lived up to faithfully and I never knew a more conscientious surgeon” (Osler). Relevant excerpts from W.G. MacCallum’s (1874-1944) biography of Halsted were read, including a touching 4 January 1920 letter he received from Archibald Malloch (1887-1953) regarding William Osler’s death: “You have heard ere this that the dear good man is dead… I know what a true friend and comrade you have lost.” Unlike Osler, who was “widely… loved throughout the length and breadth of the world” (Malloch), Halsted became increasingly isolated in his later years and “never played to the gallery” (Osler). To those who knew him well however, he was “at heart … essentially good, sincere, generous and kindly, unsparing of himself in the relief of suffering” (Welch).
12 July 2022
On Tuesday 12 July 2022, WOSANZ commemorated William Osler’s 173rd birthday with a reading of his celebrated 1904 Ingersoll Lecture on Science and Immortality. Saturated with scholarly references to the sayings of poets, prophets, and philosophers, Osler provides a sweeping overview of his chosen subject, sharing a physician’s perspective on belief in immortality from three commonly assumed viewpoints. Most of us, Osler observes – like the lukewarm Christians of Laodicea – are practically indifferent to the question of personal immortality, and “the society set of the modern world… cares not a fig for the life to come.” Naturalists and investigators also “live wholly uninfluenced by a thought of the hereafter.” Like the Roman senator Gallio, (5BC – 65) – whose indifference towards religious disputes led him to dismiss Jewish accusations against St Paul the Apostle – the Gallionians “care for none of these things.” The last group, modelled on the example of St Teresa (1515-1582), were considered “the most interesting group of the three.” “Laden with fire” for their ideals, this “little flock of Teresians” have “in every age… kept alive this sentiment of immortality.” Described by Osler as “the moral leaven of humanity,” the Teresians “compel admiration and imitation by the character of the life they lead and the beneficence of the influence they exert.” Osler was most likely thinking of his own mother Ellen Picton (1806-1907) when he referred to the “heroic devotion” of “the beautiful life of some good woman [whose silent prayers] do more to keep alive among the Laodiceans a belief in immortality than all the preaching in the land.” Whilst the scientific revolution had transformed society “more effectively and more permanently than all the efforts of man in all preceding generations,” “of the things that are unseen science knows nothing, and has at present no means of knowing anything.” The meeting concluded with a review of the printed second (Osler centenary) volume of Osleriana, an executive decision being made to finally upload the belated December 2020 publication online.
8 July 2022
On Friday 8 July 2022, WOSANZ members commemorated the bicentenary of the tragic death by drowning of the celebrated English romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). Shelley’s short but passionate life was marked by both poetic and political reform, his saccharine sentiment and progressivist views living on in many of his highly idealised and ofttimes provocative poems. His works were more widely circulated and read after his untimely death at the age of 29, and were particularly enjoyed by William Osler. Shelley is often quoted by Osler in his writings, and three of Osler’s most famous essays (Man’s Redemption of Man, The Evolution of Modern Medicine, and The Old Humanities and The New Science) conclude with direct references to Shelley’s famous line on “happiness and science” – Osler owned an original signed presentation copy of Queen Mab (1813) from where this quotation is taken. The two had a mutual friend in Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) of “Abou ben Adhem” fame, and Osler chose to conclude his final ever publication – a tribute to Sir Victor Horsley (1857-1916) – with a verse taken out of Shelley’s Adonais. These same lines were read in memory of Shelley towards the close of our meeting, alongside other chosen excerpts from Alastor, The Cloud, and Shelley’s final unfinished poem, The Triumph of Life, which was read in full. Original eye-witness accounts of the Death and Cremation of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1822) off the coast of Italy recapture in vivid detail the tragic circumstances and aftermath of the good poet’s death. We read in that account about the politically active Shelley’s early exile from England, but “it was impossible for all the mists raised up by envy and bigotry to conceal… the transcendent goodness of his heart.”
22 February 2022
On Tuesday 22 February 2022, WOSANZ marked the bicentenary of the eminent 19th century German clinician and medical professor, Adolf Kussmaul (1822-1902). The meeting was centered around a detailed biographical overview of Kussmaul’s long life and extensive works in medicine, an erudite and engaging account of which was given by the respected U.S. based Kussmaul scholar and retired rheumatologist, Professor Eric L. Matteson. In a remarkably well-illustrated presentation replete with rare and personalized images from Professor Matteson’s musings about his subject for over two decades, Kussmaul was brought to life as a skilled and cultured physician who lived up to his own medical motto – “think clearly, be sincere, act calmly.” Kussmaul’s six-decade career in academic medicine took him through four great German universities in Heidelberg, Erlangen, Freiburg, and Strasbourg – where he once supervised and later provided a glowing reference for the founder of the University of Sydney Medical School, Sir Thomas Peter Anderson Stuart (1856-1920). He was an innovative and solution-oriented practitioner who devised the first (non-functioning) ophthalmoscope (1845), developed a gastric pump to successfully treat gastric outlet obstruction (1867), and performed the first ever rigid oesophagoscopy with attempted gastroscopy in a professional sword swallower (1868). Kussmaul was also the first to diagnose superior mesenteric artery embolism in a living patient (1864), originally described dyslexia as ‘word blindness’ (1877), and accurately reported the clinical and pathological features of polyarteritis nodosa (or Kussmaul-Maier disease) in a historical 1866 article which was translated into English by Professor Matteson in 1998. Widely used clinical terms like “pulsus parodoxus” and “poliomyelitis” (according to some authors) were originally introduced by Kussmaul, and eponymous entities such as “Kussmaul’s sign” and “Kussmaul’s respiration” are known to physicians everywhere. Reflections upon the utility of clinical eponyms to foster interest in virtual mentors like Kussmaul led to a wider discussion around the pros and cons of eponymous terminologies, a subject which has long interested both Eric (who helped to rename ‘Wegener’s granulomatosis’) and Nadeem (who shared a specialised historical timeline summarising the development of eponymy in medicine over two millennia). Adolf Kussmaul’s unmistakably humanistic outlook for the medical profession has been favourably recorded by both current and contemporary authors. He undoubtedly “took an important part in the development of scientific medicine,” and “reached a position of the very first rank among the physicians of Europe.” “But he was more than this,” William Osler proclaims: “the qualities of heart and head were equal; he was a good as well as a great man.”
11 & 23 January 2022
On Tuesday 11th January, and Sunday 23rd January 2022 respectively, WOSANZ members successively commemorated the centenaries of the first insulin injection of a human diabetic with the goal of reducing blood sugar levels, and the first ever widely reported successful such injection twelve days later. Leonard Thompson’s (1908-1935) remarkable recovery from impending diabetic coma and death at the Toronto General Hospital in January of 1922 was made possible by one of modern medicine’s most memorable clinical breakthroughs. To mark the one-hundredth anniversary of this important milestone, the story of insulin’s discovery, development, and introduction into clinical use was retold in a richly illustrated formal presentation to physician-trainees at The Wollongong Hospital (NSW) on 11 January 2022. Summarising the combined efforts of Frederick Grant Banting (1891-1941), Charles Herbert Best (1899-1978), James Bertram Collip (1892-1965), and John James Rickard Macleod (1876-1935), original source material was used to demonstrate the direct patient impact of the Toronto group’s Nobel Prize winning work. The same talk was shared during the Society’s online insulin centenary meeting on 23 January 2022, which was attended by the University of Calgary Professor of Pathology and all-around history of insulin scholar, James R. Wright Jr. – WOSANZs latest Honorary Member. Professor Wright provided an astonishingly informative and in-depth analysis of the discovery of insulin, highlighting various scientific, pathological, historical, and cultural nuances that helped to bring the discovery and its discoverers into proper perspective. His own work in the field of fish islet xenotransplantation research followed on from Macleod’s historical works in this area, and was first stimulated by Michael Bliss’ (1941-2017) definitive 1982 work on The Discovery of Insulin. Jim Wright’s novel centennial analyses of the introduction of insulin led him to writing on Banting’s original idea of using fetal bovine islets as a more potent source of insulin for clinical use. After earlier reviewing the relevant literature, Dr M. W. Shinwari, a veterinary pathologist from Brisbane with a focus on farm animals, suggested that the islet rich pancreata of bovine fetuses might be accounted for by their potential role in maternal blood sugar regulation and the metabolic maintenance of bulky muscle tissues in the mother. To conclude the meeting, an original 12 July 1957 recording of Charles Best’s largely forgotten Oslerian oration on “The Discovery of Insulin” was listened to in full. This remarkable oration was recently digitised by The Osler Club of London and uploaded online to YouTube by WOSANZ to mark this historic anniversary.
21 October 2021
On Thursday, 21 October 2021, WOSANZ commemorated the “father of medical genetics” Victor Almon McKusick (1921-2008) on the occasion of his 100th birthday. Born an identical twin on his father’s rural farm in Parkman, central Maine, McKusick often said that he was destined to become a geneticist. He pursued a career in clinical cardiology after graduating from Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1946, but was ultimately led into the field of clinical genetics through his studies of Marfan’s syndrome and other “heritable disorders of connective tissue.” In 1949, McKusick collaborated with Harold Joseph Jeghers (1904-1990) to originally report the condition now known as Peutz-Jeghers syndrome, and personally corresponded with Osler’s junior London colleague Frederick Parkes Weber (1863-1962) to trace the clinical fate of Sir Jonathan Hutchinson’s (1828-1913) Howard twins who were diagnosed with a “polyps-and-spots syndrome” in 1894. In 1952, the aspiring geneticist published “The Clinical Observations of Jonathan Hutchinson,” a detailed study of Hutchinson’s extensive archive of clinical material that had originally been acquired by Johns Hopkins in 1915 on the insistence of William Osler. McKusick inherited Joseph Earle Moore’s (1892-1958) chronic diseases clinic at Johns Hopkins in 1957, which he transformed into the first specialist medical genetics centre in the United States. It was through his work at the Moore clinic and also studies on the Amish that McKusick helped to classify the mucopolysaccharidoses, defined various forms of skeletal dysplasias, and identified homocysteinuria as an autosomal recessive phenotype resembling Marfan syndrome. The first edition of McKusick’s Mendelian inheritance in Man textbook was published in 1966, in which he set out to catalogue all known X-linked and autosomal inherited genetic disorders. The book went through eleven printed editions and has been continuously maintained online since 1987 as the OMIM – the most important organised catalogue of genetic diseases in the world. Victor McKusick was the William Osler Professor of Medicine at John Hopkins from 1973 to 1985. He was a recognised world leader in the fledgling field of medical genomics, and educated a generation of geneticists to follow in his wake. A special November 2021 centenary Festschrift volume of the American Journal of Medical Genetics (Volume 185, Issue 11) recounts his many valued contributions to the field.
13 October 2021
On Wednesday, 13 October 2021, WOSANZ celebrated the bicentenary of the preeminent German pathologist, anthropologist, and social reformer, Rudolf Ludwig Karl Virchow (1821-1902). The meeting commenced with a detailed breakdown of Virchow's remarkable medical career, noting in particular his foundational work on Cellular Pathologie (1858), his inauguration of the one of the oldest pathology journals in the world (Virchows Archiv, published since 1847), and his introduction of ubiquitously utilised pathological terms like 'ischaemia', 'leukaemia', 'thrombosis', and 'embolism.’ Virchow’s study of the social determinants of disease led him to advocate for sweeping public health reforms in parliament, and his later years were given to important anthropological and ethnological researches. Dr Kenneth Winkel’s talk to the group focussed on these wider aspects of Virchow’s legacy, stressing a multifocal humanistic view of medicine which prioritised active over passive advocacy and equity over elitism. Activist doctors like Virchow emerged from certain truth-seeking traditions common to physician-naturalists of the 18th and 19th centuries – physicians who studied all aspects of nature and comparative anatomy to better understand the human condition. A very well received virtual online tour of Virchow’s historical pathological museum on the grounds of the Charité Hospital – now the Berlin Museum of Medical History – was given by Professor Thomas Schnalke. Opened in 1899 and built to Virchow’s own specifications, the Museum was at one time a storehouse of some 23,000 pathological specimens of all-known human diseases. A room-by-room tour of the museum featuring contemporary and historical exhibitions covering various aspects of medicine’s modern scientific and cultural histories finally led to Virchow’s own lecture theatre – a heavily bombed war time relic which remains in ruins. A large portrait of Virchow’s 80th birthday celebration ceremony hangs in the same area, a pleasant reminder of the once vibrant environment created by the internationally respected pathologist. “Virchow's career is without parallel in our profession,” William Osler once stated; “in the profession we revere him as the greatest master that has appeared among us since John Hunter.” And yet, at the same time – as was succinctly stated at the time of Virchow’s death in September of 1902 – “He was always the same… always the simple little grey man, sincere, kindly, unassuming, absorbed in his subject, not in himself… profound and penetrating in thought, plain in utterance, the embodiment of accurate knowledge and sound judgement, the true servant of truth.”
14 September 2021
The celebrated Italian poet and author Dante Alighieri (c.1265-1321) was commemorated by WOSANZ on Tuesday 14 September 2021 to mark the 700th anniversary of his death from quartan malarial fever in the Northern Italian province of Ravenna. Born into a Florentine family around the year 1265, Dante’s career in politics and poetry was shaped by the volatile Guelph-Ghibelline conflict then engulfing Florence, and also his early exposure to Tuscan and troubadour influencers of the Sicilian School of poetry. He met with the chief inspiration of his life and work in the person of Beatrice Portinari (1265-1290), “the glorious lady of my mind” who features prominently in both his La Vita Nuova (1292) and the Divina Commedia (c.1308-1320), the greatest work of Italian literature ever written. Aspiring to a political position, the “Divine Italian” (as Osler called him) entered Florence’s Guild of Physicians and Apothecaries in 1295. He made reference to classical Greco-Roman (Hippocrates, Galen) and Islamic physicians (Avicenna, Averroes) in Canto IV of his Inferno, indicating some familiarity with medicine, but is not known to have formally studied or practiced the profession. Dante’s political affiliations led to him being permanently exiled from the city of his birth in 1302, a ruling that was symbolically revoked by the city of Florence seven centuries later in 2008. The full story of Dante’s Life, Exile, and Legacy is neatly summarised in a narrated picture-documentary by Dr Romana Cortese, which is freely available for viewing online on YouTube. The meeting concluded with a reading in full of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s (1828-1882) translation of The New Life (1899) – a fitting eulogy to the good Florentine’s spiritualisation of medieval courtly love.
31 August 2021
On Tuesday, 31 August 2021, WOSANZ celebrated the bicentenary of the preeminent German physiologist and physicist, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (1821-1894). In what turned to be one of the Society’s most successful meetings to date, Helmholtz’s various contributions to medicine and science were reviewed before a small but captivated audience including international guests Professors Nicholas Wade and Lydia Patton. A detailed exposition of Helmholtz’s life and work was given by Zaheer, followed by a technical analysis of Helmholtz’s invention of the ophthalmoscope – with a photograph of Zaheer’s own fundus providing a nice view of the living retina in vivo. The use of precision instruments to investigate physiological phenomena led Helmholtz to make the first measurements of the speed of nervous impulses, and also to confirm the lenticular theory of ocular accommodation. Useful insights into the history and mechanism of Helmholtz’s ophthalmometer (a precursor to today’s keratometers) were shared by a practicing Queensland optometrist (Ajmal), before further discussions concerning Helmholtz’ works on the physiology and psychology of vision. Associate Professor Lydia Patton explored Helmholtz’s epistemology, summarising his views on the “physiological psychology” of vision as told in section 26 of his famous Handbook of Physiological Optics (1867). Diverse dimensions of visual experience were thoughtfully considered by Helmholtz, and these were central to his own conceptualisation of an empiricist theory of sensory perception that challenged the nativist views of Ewald Hering (1834-1918). The various editions and translations of Helmholtz’s Handbuch were recapped by Professor Nicholas Wade, whose presentation was illustrated with self-made anaglyphs depicting Helmholtz and his publications at various stages throughout his career. Helmholtz’s visits to the United Kingdom were neatly summarised, including his 1871 visit to St Andrews to play golf with some of the masterminds of that era. The meeting concluded with a reading of A Few Personal Recollections (1902) by Hermann Jacob Knapp (1832-1911), who had lived next door to Helmholtz in Heidelberg for eight years. Knapp’s deep respect for his great teacher was reciprocated by William Osler, who recommended Helmholtz’s biography “to all students and young doctors,” and rejoiced on learning of Thomas Hall Shastid’s (1866-1947) translation of Helmholtz’s celebrated 1851 monograph on the ophthalmoscope. “He was a great man,” Osler reverentially remarked on writing to Shastid to congratulate him – “one of the glories of the profession.”
30 August 2021
On Monday, 30 August 2021, WOSANZ members commemorated Sir Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937) on the 150th anniversary of his birth in Brightwater near Nelson, New Zealand. Rutherford’s life and achievements were recapped in a viewing of the New Zealand National Film Unit’s wonderful 1972 production Rutherford of Nelson, a highly informative documentary summarising the great physicist’s ground-breaking works in atomic theory and contributions to discovering the nature of radioactivity. These works were further detailed in Dr David Jenkins’s 2009 Royal Society lecture on Rutherford and the Birth of Nuclear Physics (2009), which elucidates many of the man’s most important works including his interpretation of the Geiger-Marsden experiment and subsequent formulation of the planetary model of the atom. Special note was made of Ernest Rutherford’s Professorship at McGill University during William Osler’s lifetime, and his 1908 Chemistry Nobel Prize winning works on radioactive decay. The meeting concluded with the sharing of an original December 1935 video recording of “the most famous New Zealander of all time.”
12 July 2021
The Society’s annual William Osler birthday meeting was conducted virtually online on 12 July 2021. Brief opening remarks concerning the medical diagnosis of Rani the dwarf cow (of Bangladesh) brought members’ attention to this remarkable contrivance of nature, with the possibility of Ellis-van Creveld syndrome – a form of chondrodysplastic dwarfism affecting both cow and man alike – being noted after earlier consultation with a miniature cow specialist from Arizona. A full hour or so was spent reading through William Osler’s The Student Life, one of the good doctor’s most inspiring orations which was delivered to medical students in April of 1905 before his leaving the United States for Oxford. Osler’s lovable humour and delightful conversation around matters medical captivated us all, his aspirational vision for the profession encapsulated in his noble ideal of medicine as “a daily joy and a life of as much happiness and usefulness as can well fall to the lot of man.” The essay was followed with a full recitation of one of Osler’s favourite poems – Shelley’s Adonais, An Elegy on the Death of John Keats (1821) – a dedication which doubled as a timely tribute to the celebrated English poet and once medical student who died from tuberculosis two centuries ago.
27 January 2021
WOSANZ members convened online on 27 January 2021 to mark the 400th birth anniversary of Thomas Willis (1621-1675), the pioneering 17th century English physician-anatomist who is often credited with introducing the term “neurologie” into the medical literature and is otherwise widely known by name for his description of the cerebral arterial circle (of Willis). The Society was honoured to host Willis scholar, neurohistorian, and Cambridge Professor of Neurology, Alastair Compston, an international authority on Willis who has completed a new bio-bibliography for release in June. Professor Compston guided discussions around Willis’ biography and medical contributions, illustrating points of interest with original images from his vast collection of 17th century Willis publications. Special note was made of Willis’ neuroanatomical contributions, his description of diabetic urine (“wonderfully sweet as it were imbued with honey or sugar”), and early report of asthma as an obstructive pathology of the bronchi. William Osler’s 14 November 1916 remarks concerning Thomas Willis were read in full, with some critique by Professor Compston of Osler’s premature dismissal of Willis’ pharmacopoeia and therapeutics. “It is astonishing on how small a cork a man will float down the ages,” Osler said in relation to the Circle of Willis, a statement as true of Osler today (viz. “Osler’s nodes”) as it is of Willis. We were privileged to have in attendance our dear old Brisbane friend Professor Mervyn Eadie, whose own professional example and historical works have been such an inspiration to the Society. The meeting concluded with a 1675 Elegy On the most Famous and Learned Physitian Dr Willis, whose “great wisdom understood, The circling Ocean of the bloud.”
29 December 2020
WOSANZ members convened online on Tuesday 29 December 2020 to mark the 101st anniversary of William Osler’s passing. After introducing the Society’s newest member Dr Femi Afolayan – a dual advanced trainee in general medicine and geriatrics from Geelong – various historical subjects and potential future projects were discussed. The Society’s evolution over the past twelve months was reviewed with special reference to the launching of its website on 29 December 2019, and a corresponding visit to Oxford, UK, to mark the centenary of William Osler’s death a year prior (when the above photo of Osler’s home was taken). Femi provided a brief resume of his medical career, indicating his long-term interests in historical matters and admiration for William Osler as a leader of internal medicine. Recent calls for Osler to be renounced in an article published by the Canadian Medical Association Journal were also examined, Femi aptly remarking that: “the glow of a candle need not be diminished in lighting another.”
19 October 2020
Sir Thomas Browne’s (1605-1682) 415th birthday was duly commemorated by WOSANZ on the evening of 19 October 2020. Browne’s life and writings were enthusiastically reviewed during the meeting, with specific reference to William Osler’s 1905 tercentenary Address on Sir Thomas Browne, which was read in full and further commentated upon. A long selection of choice excerpts were recited from Browne’s Religio Medici (1642), Hydriotaphia Urn Burial (1658), Christian Morals (1716), and A Letter to a Friend (1690). Plans for Volume 2 of the Society’s journal – Osleriana – were discussed and finalised before a return to Browne’s seductive writings. Layer upon layer of meaning and depth emanated from the writings of the old Norwich physician, whose quaint phrases and arresting style stirred both participants into the early hours of the morning.
2 October 2020
The Osler Club of London’s much anticipated 1 October 2020 ‘Osler Legacy Meeting’ – which was originally planned to be held at the Royal College of Physicians of London – was conducted virtually online. Members from WOSANZ joined the meeting, watching a series of interesting online contributions from around 02:00 A.M. to 05:00 A.M. on 2 October 2020 (AEDT). Professor Jane Dacre spoke of Osler’s role as a medical educator, emphasizing especially “the wisdom of fatherhood” that permeates throughout his teachings. Dr Hilary Morris made interesting remarks regarding Osler’s contributions to the discipline of medical history, poignantly noting that there is a “notable reluctance [among historians] to give… [due] credit to his role as a medical historian.” Dr James Le Fanu spoke warmly and upliftingly on the topic of “kindness as a virtue” in medicine, before Daniel Sokol illustrated the Oslerian principle of employing both “head and heart” in clinical decision making. In a panel meeting with all presenters, Dr Graham Kyle posed the question: “why does William Osler remain such a medical icon? Dr Lefanu provided a most attractive answer: “he is an exemplar; what one would wish their own doctor to be like.” The proceedings concluded with Dr John Ward’s 19th Poynter Lecture on William Osler “the great medical internationalist.” The talk was a delightful recap of Osler’s life in many countries, illustrating his broader sympathies across wider Europe, and the importance of international cooperation in medicine. A devout Johnsonian, Dr Ward paid a moving final tribute to William Osler in the words of Samuel Johnson (1709-1784): “there was nothing he touched that he did not adorn… his spirit lives on in multiple societies… that bear his name.”
12 July 2020
William Osler’s 171st birthday was marked by WOSANZ in a small commemorative gathering held in Wollongong, NSW, on Sunday, 12 July 2020. The meeting was centered around a review of Charles Bryan’s recently published masterwork on Sir William Osler (pictured), the culmination of almost 30 years scholarship in the area of Osler studies. The encylcopaedia’s front matter, index, and a varied selection of highly interesting and informative articles were read, the overall quality of the production eliciting favorable comments from both reviewers. William Osler’s full 1913 address to Yale students on A Way of Life and further excerpts from Sir Thomas Browne were also read, before a series of specialty medical college exam questions were discussed late into the evening. A variety of venues were visited throughout the day, including the idyllic Wollongong beach-side, where Bryan’s Encyclopedia and Browne’s Religio were enjoyed in the afternoon sun.
12 May 2020
In the group’s first ever online meeting on Tuesday 12 May 2020, members of the William Osler Society of Australia & New Zealand convened to commemorate Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) – matron of modern nursing – on the bicentenary of her birth. After a well delivered summary of Nightingale’s life and achievements given by Dr Edward Carson, William Osler’s quaint 1891 remarks to the first class of graduates from the Training School for Nurses of the Johns Hopkins Hospital (published as ‘Doctor and Nurse’) were read. Long excerpts from Nightingale’s classical Notes on Nursing (1859) and Sir Thomas Browne’s (1605-1682) commentary on social isolation were sequentially discussed, before an original 30 July 1890 Edison paraffin wax cylinder recording of Florence Nightingale’s voice brought the meeting to a close.
29 February 2020
On Saturday 29 February 2020, members of The William Osler Society of Australia & New Zealand convened in Sydney to mark the centennial anniversary of the passing of Sir Thomas Peter Anderson Stuart (1856-1920), founder of the University of Sydney Medical School. After a guided tour of the historical Anderson Stuart building at the University of Sydney and selected readings from local obituary articles, a trip was made to South Head Cemetery where a grave-site dedication was read and a centenary floral wreath was placed by Anderson Stuart’s final resting place. This same wreath was later displayed outside the medical school.
26 January 2020
Members of the William Osler Society of Australia & New Zealand attended the University of Oxford to partake in the Osler centenary conference held there on Sunday 26 January 2020. The proceedings began at Osler’s former Oxford home, where several Oslerians had gathered to witness the unveiling of a new Osler centenary portrait completed by Tarleton Blackwell (pictured) and donated to 13 Norham Gardens by Charles and Donna Bryan. A tour of Christ Church College followed, before two engaging lectures relating to Osler were given on the College campus. Alan Chapman spoke on the influences of Burton, Willis and Locke on Osler, and Charles S. Bryan delivered a most informative account of William Osler’s life, lively pointing out the character traits that made him one of the profession’s most beloved physicians. The conference ended in a solemn but splendid evening ceremony held at Oxford’s historical Christ Church Cathedral, where the Dean conducted a heart-felt and moving service dedicated to William Osler’s memory.
1 January 2020
The William Osler Society of Australia & New Zealand marked the centenary of Sir William Osler’s funeral in a small afternoon ceremony at Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford. A brief dedication was read and a centenary wreath was placed in the Lady Chapel alongside an 1862 copy of Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici.
29 December 2019
The William Osler Society of Australia & New Zealand commemorated the centenary of Sir William Osler’s death in a small private ceremony at 13 Norham Gardens, Oxford. Further details are to be provided in volume 2 of the Society’s journal. The Society’s official website was also launched on this same day as a centenary tribute to Sir William Osler.
