Oslerian Orators

An asterisk indicates that there is a copy in the Library.

A plus sign indicates that there is a recording in the Library.

Year Name of Orator Subject
1 1928 Sir Wilmot Herringham Spoke of Osler’s love of rare cases
2 1929 * Sir Archibald Garrod The Power of Personality
3 1930 Harvey Cushing On his “The Life of Sir William Osler” (1926)
4 1931 * William Stobie Osler & Tuberculosis
5 1932 R W Chapman Book Production in the Eighteenth Century
6 1933 * Sir W Langdon-Brown The Psychology of Authorship
7 1934 * Professor John Beattie The True Record of Egerton Yourrick Davis MD
8 1935 * Professor John Fulton Fracastorius
9 1936 * Lord Horder Septic Endocarditis
10 1937 A G Gibson Thomas Willis, Practitioner & Scientist
11 1938 Archibald Malloch Old Oslerian Platitudes
12 1939 Gilbert Frankau Are we over-doctored?
13 1950 * Sir Henry Souttar Discusses his own associations with Sir William Osler
14 1951 * S C Roberts Rev James Beresford (1764 – 1840)
15 1952 Sir Zachary Cope The Relations Between Physicians and Surgeons Through the Ages
16 1953 Wilder Penfield After-dinner Thoughts on the Learning of Languages
17 1954 H T Pledge Rabelais and his Background
18 1955 * A P Cawadias From Epidauros to Pall Mall East
19 1956 Ellis Waterhouse Dr Rembrandt
20 1957 + Charles Best The Discovery of Insulin
21 1958 * Sir Ernest Gowers Medical Jargon
22 1959 * Viscount Soulbury The Physician and the Humanities
23 1960 Sir George Pickering Autobiographical Reminiscences of the Osler Club
24 1961 * Douglas Guthrie The Traveller looks both ways
25 1962 *+ W R Bett The Epitaph of Adrian’s House
26 1963 + Sir Robert Platt Frederick III’s last Illness
27 1964 * Sir Charles Dodds The College, then and now
28 1965 *+ Martin Cummings Books, Computers, and Medicine
29 1966 * Charles Coury Sir William Osler & French Medicine
30 1967 William Bean Aphorisms and Other Things
31 1968 Sir Hedley Atkins We are not Amused
32 1969 C D O’Malley The Lure of Padua
33 1970 * Fred B Rogers The Lure of Philadelphia
34 1971 + Sir John McMichael Specialism in Medicine
35 1972 *+ Sir Richard Doll Osler’s English School
36 1973 Huw Wheldon A Perspective in Television
37 1974 + Henry Miller Osler & Allbutt: Two Great Contemporaries
38 1975 + Sir Ernest Gombrich Health & Beauty: Galen, Winckelmann, and the Classical Idea
39 1976 Sir Roger Ormerod On the McNaughten Rules
40 1977 * Charles Newman The Place of Osler as a Medicial Scientist
41 1978 Alfred White Franklin Our Early Entourage – a few Friends and some Hons
42 1979 Sir John Butterfield Doctors, Drugs and Diet: Two Dilemmas
43 1980 * Sir Cyril Clarke The Unquiet Art
44 1981 Sir Douglas Black Linacre, Harvey, Osler; three physicians he admired with thoughts on the media
45 1982 Sir Peter Tizard Osler’s Contribution to the Study of Cerebral Palsy in Children
46 1983 Alastair Robb-Smith The Mysterious Affair at Kelloe
47 1984 Sir Raymond Hoffenberg Osler and the Thyroid
48 1985 Sir Christopher Booth Osler- Medical Research & Northwick Park
49 1986 * Sir Gordon Wolstenholme The Besetting Sin of the Young Physician…
50 1987 Sir David Innes Williams The Evolution of Professional Discipline
51 1988 Sir Geoffrey Slaney The Quest for Quality
52 1989 Dame Barbara Clayton Studies of Inherited Metabolic Disorders and their Contribution to Clinical Medicine
53 1990 * Lord Asa Briggs Doctors & Historians
54 1991 John Marks The Politics of State Health Care: A Historical Analysis
55 1992 Professor D Geraint James A Double Centenary Celebration
56 1994 Professor Bill Bynum Osler’s Moon: Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt
57 1995 Sir James Watt Music of Hippocrates
58 1996 Richard Harries, The Lord Bishop of Oxford The Church and Healing
59 1997 Dr John Cule On Heroes and Hero Worship
60 1998 Professor Harold Ellis Some of my Surgical Heroes
61 1999 Lord Walton of Detchant An Osler Ode
62 2000 Sir David Weatherall From Osler to the Barefoot Doctor: the Role of Science in the Future of Medical Education
63 2001 Dr Charles Bryan Lewellys Franklin Barker: Osler’s American Succesor
64 2002 Professor T Jock Murray Was the Count of Monte Christo a Physician? Observations of the Medical References in the writings of Alexandre Dumas, Père
65 2003 Professor Sir Graeme Catto The Shape of Things to come…
66 2004 Professor Neil McIntyre Lest We Forget
67 2005 Sir Barry Jackson Florence Nightingale
68 2006 Professor Michael Biddis Nazi Medicine
69 2007 Dr John Blair Osler’s Unfilled slot
70 2008 Professor Ian Gilmore The New Physician
71 2009 Professor John Pearn Differentiating Diseases; the Centrum of Differential Diagnosis in the Evolution of Oslerian Medicine
72 2010 Dr John Le Fanu Why us? Science and the Restitution of man
73 2011 Professor Alfredo Buzzi William Osler as a Medical Historian and Biographer
74 2012 + Professor Terence Ryan Embracing Global Health with Open Arms
75 2013 Dr Robert Maxwell Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee – The birth and career of King Edward’s Hospital Fund for London
76 2014 Professor Peter Kopelman Medical Education 100 years after Osler – where have we come from and where are we going?
77 2015 Dr Raymond Tallis Science and Scientism
78 2016 Dr Theodore Dalrymple Some Medical Writers on Shakespeare
79 2017 Professor Edward Howard Florence Nightingale – statistician, administrator and workhouse reformer
80 2018 Professor Sir Muir Gray The Elixir of Life discovered at Oxford
81 2019 Professor Dame Jane Dacre The Royal College of Physicians - looking back over 500 years
2020 - Cancelled due to Covid-19
82 2021 Professor Tilli Tansey Wellcome and Osler: North American influences on British medicine
83 2022 Professor Dame Carrie MacEwen Osler - what would he think today?
84 2023 Professor Christopher Gardner-Thorpe The nervous Osler

The 11th Oration was initially thought to have no title and apart from a list of those present no minutes were ever written. The true title of Archibald Malloch’s Oration is recorded in John Fulton’s biography of Harvey Cushing and is: “Old Oslerian platitudes.” John Fulton’s ‘Harvey Cushing’, Blackwell Oxford 1946 pg 698, from Arnold Klebs’ diary: ‘In the evening of this, Sir William Osler’s birthday, we attended the annual meeting of the Osler Club where Archie Malloch was to give the annual oration. A big table full of nice people ate dinner together at the Langham Hotel and afterwards Malloch gave an address on old Oslerian platitudes, but it was nice and friendly and in that it represented the Osler spirit….’

Annual dinners of the club were held in 1947, 1948 and in 1993, but there were no Orators as such. Speakers, however, for the first two dates were as follows:

1947: John Fulton & Geoffrey Keynes; each spoke on Medical Biography

1948: A symposium was held

Name Subject
William Stobie Osler as a Physician
Sir Arthur MacNalty Osler as a Scientist
Geoffrey Keynes Osler as a Bibliographer
W R Bett Osler Legend
A White Franklin History of the Osler Club