Osler's Bedside Library

Regarded by many as the ideal medical practitioner, Sir William Osler advised physicians to "let no day pass without contact with the best literature of the world." "Before going to sleep," he counseled, "read for half an hour" from a "bedside library," beginning with "a list of ten books which you may make close friends." A companion and guide for contemporary readers, Osler's Bedside Library features excerpts from the literary masterpieces Osler himself recommended to his students and colleagues plus 20 other great works chosen by today's physicians. Each excerpt is accompanied by commentary from a leading scholar in medical humanities, who discusses why the work remains relevant to the physician's education and the practice of medicine. A unique volume, Osler's Bedside Library underscores that now, as in Osler's own time, selections from the humanities deserve a place on the physician's list of "required reading." Featured Classics: Plutarch's Lives ~ Religio Medici ~ Shakespeare's Othello, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, and various Sonnets ~ Montaigne ~ Marcus Aurelius ~ Epictetus ~ Don Quixote ~ Emerson ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes ~ Old and New Testaments ~ Robert Burns ~ John Keats ~ George Eliot ~ Charles Dickens ~ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ~ Sarah Orne Jewett ~ Robert Louis Stevenson ~ Boccaccio ~ Rabelais ~ Robert Burton ~ Ben Franklin ~ Erasmus ~ Maimonides ~ Pascal ~ Voltaire ~ Ibsen ~ Molière ~ George Bernard Shaw ~ Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year ~ Avicenna