On February 22, 1905, Dr. William Osler, at the point of leaving Johns Hopkins Hospital where he’d served brilliantly as chief of staff for 15 years, made a farewell speech to fellow clinicians, medical school staff, members of Baltimore’s social and intellectual elite, and newspaper reporters who’d been assigned to see the great man off.

Osler’s valedictory was by turns serious and droll. Delivered by a 55-year-old dynamo of invention and effectiveness (he dreamed up and installed, among other lasting innovations, the medical residency) who was leaving medical management for a soft and distinguished academic chair at Oxford, the speech’s theme was the need for the continual refreshment of medical staffs with young doctors. It was a matter Osler had addressed previously, with no resultant controversy. Men between the ages of 25 and 40, Osler told his audience on this day, were at their most productive, while those over 40 were of “comparative uselessness,” and those over 60 were suitable only for retirement with a good pension. Osler then cited “that charming novel,” The Fixed Period, in which Anthony Trollope’s “plot hinges upon the admirable scheme of a college into which at 60 men retired for a year of contemplation before a peaceful departure by chloroform.”

That Osler meant these points to be reflective and not prescriptive is clear from his talk as a whole, which features sev-eral tongue-in-cheek references to his own fast-approaching senescence. (A Freudian might even say that the speech betrayed some guilt over abandoning Hopkins for a much less demanding post.) Few in the Baltimore audience were, in any case, dismayed by what he said, his reputation for ironic humor being as well known as his gifts for humane teaching and dazzling feats of diagnosis. The press however, seeing its humorless duty to warn the world of present danger and sell newspapers at the same time, responded with three-tiered headlines such as “FIXES LIMIT OF MAN’S USEFULNESS AT FORTY—Dr. Osler Asserts Belief That Value to the World Ends Then—SUGGESTS DEATH AT SIXTY.”

The New York Times, in which that alarm rang on February 24, went on, as other newspaper stories did, to “prove” Osler wrong by offering up a list of men who accomplished much when past 60, not to mention 40, and noting, in a final righteous paragraph, that Osler himself had acquired “a great part of his fame” since landing at Hopkins in the very year in which he’d turned 40.

There followed, of course, editorials that sifted antiquity and Who’s Who for prodigious Methuselahs—e.g., Columbus was 41 when he sailed—and letters to the editor attacking Osler, his knowledge of medicine, and even his textbook The Principles and Practice of Medicine, with one writer declaring that “Many medical authors have written works, when long past 60, that . . . cast [Principles] into the shade.” (Principles, it should be noted, which first appeared in 1892, was a best-seller for decades, and was not cast into the shade by its publisher until 1947.) Elected officials got in on the act, with “Uncle Joe” Cannon, the 69-year-old speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, pronouncing to the press that he, in fact, felt “frisky.” And to “oslerize” briefly and ignominiously entered the language, as in “please don’t oslerize me, Doc.”

Had an eminent scholar ventured osler’s views in 1705 or 1805 instead of 1905, not much would have been made of it—there just weren’t a lot of sixty-year olds around—and not a great number of 40-year olds either. By 1900, however, life expectancy for men—while still well below 60—had begun to rise, from roughly 37 years of age in 1850 to 47 years of age—and so had fears that the growing gang of geezers, whose members could once have been set to shucking corn and collecting eggs on the family farm, would only stand in the way of progress and prosperity in an industrial age. The speech by Osler tread hard on this sensitivity. One of the country’s most eminent physicians had now declared that men ought to be superannuated at some fixed point, or retired, as we now say—an action that prior to the 20th century was about as rare as it had been in Cro-Magnon times, and that, as the Saturday Review complained in 1903, capturing the horrified views of most American men, “simulates the forced inactivity of death.”

Retirement did of course achieve differentiation from death, thanks largely to Social Security—which made it feasible—and to wonders such as penicillin and artificial heart valves (which made it likely). Osler’s reputation as one of the great physician-teachers of modern times has prospered as well, with diseases, conditions, awards, two biographies, tens of thousands of web pages, and a medical library in Canada carrying his name. And his textbook, The Principles and Practice of Medicine, is back on the market, though under new authorship, of course, and doing very well. Editorial writers at the Times in 1905 would doubtless have felt vindicated.

Our story on the continuing struggle to come to terms with more years of life than history has prepared us for begins here.

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