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Michael Bliss

The Wallace K. Ferguson Prize

2000

Michael BlissWilliam Osler. A Life in Medicine. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.
William Osler. A Life in Medicine is a tour de force. With great style and unfailing empathy Michael Bliss establishes Osler’s significance in three countries as an observer and scholar of the natural history of disease, a teacher of the natural history of illness, and a working doctor’.
It is Osler’s skill as a doctor and teacher, more than his claim to scientific originality, that Bliss emphasises. As a major proponent of the clinical method (from autopsy to the stethoscope to the bedside examination to open rounds and the clinical workshop), Osler practised and publicised breakthroughs in techniques that became so basic, so normal, as to seem no longer to be techniques at all. His textbook, entitled The Principles and Practice of Medicine (1892), became the worldwide bible of medical training, remaining in print with many revisions and new editions for almost fifty years, long after Osler’s death. These claims to fame, wedded to an attractive, even charismatic personality, won Osler an international reputation as well as the love of his students and patients.
In addition to Osler’s particular contribution as an innovator in the field of modern medicine, Bliss also describes the brilliant career of a remarkably successful professional in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus, while we become familiar with the Blockley Dead House in Philadelphia where Osler conducted many of his autopsies, we also enter the senior common rooms of Princeton and Johns Hopkins Universities, and the drawing rooms of Baltimore and North Oxford, to meet the clever and the well-connected and to understand their concerns. Osler is set in his social milieu and his cultural context.
Finally, for all its length and wide-ranging scholarship, the biography is presented simply and in accessible fashion. Members of the jury greatly admired the skill of the author in telling the story of a life with all its complications and ambiguities and its myriad personal details, without losing the reader’s interest or sacrificing scholarship. William Osler is without question a page-turner of the highest quality.

Honourable Mentions:
Serge Lusignan. “Vérité garde le roy”: la construction d’une identité universitaire en France (XIIIe-XVe siècle), Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999.
La construction d’une identité universitaire en France, XIIIe-XVe siècle: “Vérité garde le roy” is an original and wonderfully successful contribution which analyses from a political and legal viewpoint universities and academics in France in the Middle Ages. This work outlines the different processes in building the identity and representation of the academics and their institutions, as well as their integration into medieval society, based on privilege and relationships with the authorities (the papacy, royalty, cities and the Parliament of Paris). The survey takes in the end of the 12th century and continues until the middle of the 15th century. It includes the universities of Orlans, Angers and Poitiers, and pays particular attention to the University of Paris which occupies a key position in the French realm. The book shows that universities are a part not only of the urban history of medieval France, but also of royal history. The study of their status reveals what has not been seen to date: that is, that they are part of and closely linked to the State’s building strategy. The abuses of this status are the cause of their decline, well before the second half of the 15th century, as has often been pointed out. It is not the university’s stand during the English period that is the origin of this decline, but more a presumptuous attitude, going against the grain of the common good, which provoked the royal powers into taking severe measures against the universities. The work also studies the complex relationships between the university and the Parliament of Paris in the order of the realm, through the themes of translatio studii and royal descent.
This study depends heavily on a systematic search of the civil registers of the Parliament of Paris, a considerable body of documentation which is used masterfully and treated with competence and care. The author makes new use of these documentary sources by following the dynamics of the relationships between the university and the authorities. The extent of the research, the original problem, the rigorousness of the arguments, the coherence of the outline, make this work an essential contribution to the history of universities and that of the State at the end of the Middle Ages.

Patricia MarchakGod’s Assassins: State Terrorism in Argentina in the 1970s. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999.
God’s Assassins: State Terrorism in Argentina in the 1970s is a powerful and innovative investigation of the human impact of Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’, which Patricia Marchak dates from 1973 to 1983. Based on interviews with many Argentine citizens, both supporters of the regime and victims of it, Marchak’s study is an anatomy of a nightmare in which an estimated 30,000 people disappeared and many thousands more were imprisoned illegally or forced into exile. It is, at one level, a case study of what happens when the state makes war on its own people, when the objective of state agencies is to kill and terrorize in the name of defending Western civilization and Christianity. At another level, it is a stirring testament to the mental courage and fortitude of the survivors.
The use of oral history allows Marchak to present all sides of the issue, but much of the emphasis s not on either supporters or opponents of the regime, but rather on all those people who were bystanders, emphasizing that the full weight of the terror lay in its arbitrary choice of victims and the impact that it was intended to have on the rest of society. This was the essence of state terrorism as a conscious instrument. In the context of absolute power, the defences of civil society disintegrated. Marchak roots the Dirty War in the context of a profoundly divided society, and, with great sensitivity, she insists that the tacit consent of a fair portion of the population was necessary for such terror to flourish. She assigns no blame, but presses the reader to a fuller understanding of the complex causation and consequences of the strategy of the national security state.
Marchak’s book thus addresses one of the characteristic phenomena of the latter half of the twentieth century, one that many countries have experienced: the internalization of an ideology in which the enemy is seen within and radical extirpation is perceived as the only sure response. The compelling character of this work also attests the value of the interdisciplinary use of history, anthropology, and sociology.