'The Periganglionic Spaces of His Grey Cortex'

“With half an hour’s reading in bed every night as a steady practice, the busiest man can get a fair education before the plasma sets in the periganglionic spaces of his grey cortex.” 

I don’t associate reading with self-improvement and have never subscribed to the eat-your-broccoli-it’s-good-for-you school of thought when it comes to books. Reading, especially serious reading of worthwhile books, is its own reward. If you want to ensure your kids remain lifelong aliterates, order them to read, turn it into an obligation and leach all the pleasure from what ought to be one of life’s chief consolations.

 

The sentence quoted at the top is spoken by Dr. William Osler (1849-1919) in Dr. Harvey Cushing’s biography of his former teacher, The Life of Sir William Osler (Oxford University Press, 1925). The thought is preceded by this context provided by Cushing, an eminent neurosurgeon:

 

“He emphasized the importance of reading as a part of post-graduate study. . . . The average non-reading doctor might play a good game of golf or of bridge, but professionally he was a lost soul. The driven or tired practitioner might plead that he could not find the time to read.”

 

Osler (1849-1919) is one of those fascinating men who turned a non-literary profession into literature, and was himself an inveterate reader, antiquarian and bibliophile. Among his favorite writers were Montaigne, Shakespeare, Robert Burton, Sir Thomas Browne, Sterne, Swift, Coleridge, Keats and Lamb. He wrote nearly as often about books as medicine. I’m not qualified to judge whether this statement by Osler, also from Cushing’s book, is true:

 

“Books are tools, doctors are craftsmen, and so truly as one can measure the development of any particular handicraft by the variety and complexity of its tools, so have we no better means of judging the intelligence of a profession than by its general collection of books. A physician who does not use books and journals, who does not need a library, who does not read one or two of the best weeklies and monthlies, soon sinks to the level of the cross-counter prescriber, and not alone in practice, but in those mercenary feelings and habits which characterize a trade.”

 

I once had a Syrian-born cardiologist who enjoyed talking about Shakespeare's work, including Othello’s final speech: “that in Aleppo once . . .”

 

The Canadian historian Michael Bliss in his William Osler: A Life in Medicine (1999) tells us Osler treated William and Henry James, Walt Whitman, and James Murray, the founding editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. He socialized with Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling, was partly responsible for getting Gertrude Stein kicked out of Johns Hopkins University (bless him), and even shows up in Finnegans Wake: “The ogry Osler will oxmaul us all.”

 

In 1892, Osler published The Principles and Practice of Medicine, a 1,050-page medical textbook he wrote single-handedly. It remained the standard text for more than 40 years and stayed in print until 2001. Even in a textbook his bibliomania was evident. Bliss writes: “He mentioned historical figures ranging from Hippocrates, Mephibosheth, and Sir Thomas Browne, through Montaigne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Coleridge, and Swift.”

 

Osler adored Tristram Shandy and in a paper devoted to birth injuries he included a footnote that “directed readers to the ravages of Dr Slop’s forceps . .  .” In addition, Bliss reports: “At times he admitted to whistling that he might not weep, like Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy.” The biographer quotes this from one of Osler’s letters: “How I should have liked to get drunk with Charles Lamb.”

 

About that quote at the top: Osler refers to the brain and the motor neurons of the autonomic nervous system, located in the spinal cord and brainstem. He’s talking about loss of brain function, dementia, what used to be called senility.

[A reader in the comment section refer to Dr. Richard Selzer, whom I wrote about here.]