William Osler's Departure from North America

To the Editor: Although Fye¹ and Relman² (May 25 issue) argue persuasively that William Osler's decision to leave Johns Hopkins for the Regius Professorship in Oxford was based on “intolerable clinical demands” and inadequate “protected time,” the deeper reason may lie in academic politics and the advent of the full-time system for hospital service chiefs advocated by Franklin P. Mall, the first professor of anatomy at Johns Hopkins Medical School. Long a proponent of inductive teaching, in which students participate rather than listen, Mall had envisioned as far back as 1900 that hospital department heads, like university leaders in the…