John Alexander Mullin (1835-1899): The Canadian Physician who first described Osler's Nodes.

Abstract

Sir William Osler (1849-1919), who became Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford in 1905, first drew attention in 1909 to the painful nodes in subacute bacterial endocarditis, which now carry his eponym, and he published an account in the Quarterly Journal of Medicine, which he helped establish. Attention is drawn to the often overlooked fact that it was a Dr John Alexander Mullin (1835-1899) of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, who first drew the attention of Sir William Oster to their occurrence. Confusion arose over the relationship between Osler's nodes and the skin lesions described by Theodore Caldwell Janeway (1872-1917), which are generally non-tender and found in acute bacterial endocarditis. The evidence is that there is essentially no difference since their pathogenesis and histological findings are identical.