William Osler's historiography: a rhetorical analysis.

Abstract

William Osler the historian is viewed principally as an early collector of medical and scientific books and as an advocate of a method of teaching the history of medicine, namely, that it be taught on wards and in clinics rather than in formal courses. Although these are accurate descriptions of his book-collecting activity and his convictions about the teaching of the history of medicine, one can go further and relate these two features to his historical writing and see the whole as a unified and consistent interpretive endeavor. My approach to Osler is rhetorical in the sense that it is primarily concerned with his historical writing as writing, and focuses specifically upon his preferred concepts (inventio), the characteristic order in which he arranged his evidence (dispositio), and how his style integrated them to form the historiographical direction of his writing. I use rhetoric not in its pejorative sense of misleading and overblown language, but as “persuasive reasoning, honestly and earnestly persuasive when good, that is, when the rhetor meets Cato's standard: vir bonus dicendi peritus.”