For Subscribers: Stolen Skulls and Racist Opinions: “Father of Modern Medicine” Under Surveillance at UC San Diego

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Alec Calac is a fourth year medical student at UC San Diego, the second person from his Native American group, Pauma, to attend medical school. His father was the first.

As proud as he is of that lineage, and as happy as the 26-year-old Escondido native says he’s going to study near his home, there’s something about campus that Calac finds disturbing.

Two things, actually a street and a parking lot.

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Both are named after Dr. William Osler, a Canadian physician sometimes referred to as the father of modern medicine. Dead for over 100 years, his legacy has come under scrutiny due to certain words and deeds, including the taking of four native skulls that Osler gave to a mentor in Germany in the 1880s.

He’s such a renowned figure that you see his name all over the medical world, said Calac, president of the Native American Medical Students Association on campus. While we appreciate this story, we cannot ignore the way he treated marginalized people.

Alec Calac, medical student and president of the Association of Native American Medical Students, at UC San Diego in 2019.

(Courtesy of Alec Calac)

Osler’s reassessment comes amid a nationwide racial calculation, sparked by the murder of George Floyds in Minneapolis 15 months ago, which toppled statues, brought down Confederate flags and changed the names of many facilities both public and private.

This struggle with questions about who should be consecrated as role models has in turn sparked a backlash from some upset by what they see as a culture of cancellation threatening to erase parts of the nation’s heritage.

At UCSD, the issues are sensitive as the campus recognizes that it was built on land not officially ceded by the Kumeyaay Nation, whose residents have lived in the region for over 10,000 years. The discovery on the La Jolla campus in 1976 of two 9,500-year-old skeletons opened up old wounds over the mistreatment of ancestral remains and sparked a legal battle between scientists who wanted to study the bones and Native Americans who wanted to repatriate them.

Historically, the campus has struggled to attract Native American students. Out of 30,794 registrants in 2019, 119 identified themselves as American Indian / Alaska Native. Calac said there were eight in the medical students association now, up from two in 2018.

Things are improving, but we still need to tackle the continued under-representation of Native Americans in graduate and professional education programs, he said. Part of this job is looking at our public spaces. Osler had no direct connection to this region.

Calac and the student association urged UCSD administrators to change the names of Osler Lane and the Osler parking structure, both located near the medical school. This month, they garnered support from the Sycuan Tribal Council, which passed a resolution asking the university to remove references to William Osler and convene a committee to choose new names.

University officials review the request.

UC San Diego has great respect for the land and the original people of the area where our campus is located, said Campus spokesperson Matt Nagel. The university strives to demonstrate this respect and works in a genuine effort to honor local tribal communities.

A legendary doctor

Much of Osler’s lingering influence stems from the changes he made to the way medical students are taught. He wanted them to learn not only in classrooms, but in hospitals, at the bedside.

He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, he once wrote, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all.

Born and raised in Canada, Osler became a pioneering educator first at his alma mater, McGill University in Montreal, where he introduced new courses in histology and pathology, and then at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, where he was one of the founders of the Faculty of Medicine. It opened in 1893.

Sir William Osler, Canadian physician and one of the four founding professors of Johns Hopkins Hospital.

(Universal History Archive / Universal Images Group via Getty)

He is the author of a textbook, The Principles and Practice of Medicine, which went through 16 editions during his lifetime and has remained a key reference for decades. He has identified several diseases, syndromes and diagnostic markers that bear his name.

Osler has contributed regularly to the scientific and medical literature and has frequently given lectures and presentations at medical conferences. He amassed a collection of 8,000 volumes of medical literature which became the foundation of what is now the Osler Library of the History of Medicine at McGill.

By 1900, his work as a clinician, educator, and consultant, and his reputation as a humanist, had made him one of the best-known physicians in the world, according to a biography posted on the National Institutes of Health website.

He died on December 29, 1919 from pneumonia. He was 70 years old.

Osler’s notoriety led to several posthumous books that reprinted his notable lectures and quotations, as well as a two-volume biography that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1926.

Many elementary and secondary schools bear his name in Canada. Buildings, walks, dining rooms and dormitories bear his name in Canada, the United States, England and India.

At UC San Diego, Osler Lane was named years ago to recognize his significant contributions to the study of medicine, said Leslie Sepuka, spokesperson for the campus. When the parking lot was built in 2018, it was also named Osler, in line with the academic practice of giving parking structures the same name as the street location to facilitate orientation for campus visitors. , she said.

Other honors in various locations around the world include a William Osler Medal, an Osler Lecture, an Osler Medicine Student Award, and an Osler Day. There’s an Osler Institute in Indiana.

The American Osler Society, founded in the early 1970s, is a group of physicians, medical historians and others dedicated to keeping Osler’s memory alive and, according to its website, to keeping his members attentive to the lessons of his life and teachings.

Four skulls to choose from

At the end of 2019, students at McGill’s medical school raised questions about Osler. They highlighted comments attributed to him which they said showed he had white supremacist and sexist views.

The students asked the university to reflect on how Sir William Osler is glorified and how his name is used uncritically. Some of the names on the buildings, the students said, should be changed to honor a more diverse group of historical figures and to better reflect our evolving social norms on the treatment of women and people of color.

A year later, an article in the Journal of the Canadian Medical Association echoed these concerns. Written by two Toronto doctors and a New York public health professor, the article criticized Osler’s racial views, citing a 1914 newspaper article that quoted him saying this about immigration: The Question With Us is what should we do when the yellow and the brown men start to proliferate?

Later in the same speech he said: We have an obligation to make our country a country of white men.

The newspaper article generated a multitude of responses from other doctors. Most defended Osler as a man of his time and said it was unfair to judge him through the prism of today.

It turns out that our Saint Osler has demons, wrote a Calgary physician. Is there a risk of denying all the good he has brought to medical practice by publicly defrocking it? This is a clear risk in the black and white court of public opinion today.

The diary also mentions a trip Osler made in 1884 to Berlin, where one of his mentors had a collection of human skeletons. Osler brought him a present.

I took four selected examples of British Columbia Indian skulls with me, knowing well how acceptable they would be, he wrote in a travel journal.

The location of these skulls, nearly 140 years later, sparked an investigation last year by journalists in Canada and Germany, who believe they found them in the holdings of an anthropological society in Berlin. A member of the Tuscarora Nation in Canada has begun the formal request process to have the remains returned to tribal lands for burial.

Calac, the UCSD medical student, said he was aware of some of Osler’s racist comments, but not the skulls, which fueled his association’s efforts to rename the street and structure to parking on campus in partnership with the community.

Osler’s actions were not small missteps, he said. The theft of indigenous remains represents a total contempt for our humanity.

UC San Diego isn’t the only place where Osler’s legacy is scrutinized. At McGill University, its alma mater, the administrators organized a symposium in February and appointed a task force to assess the naming practices of the buildings there.

The University of San Diego went through a similar process two years ago when it weighed up how to honor Father Junipero Serra, the 18th-century Spanish priest who founded the system that built 21 Catholic missions from San Diego to San Francisco.

Praised and ultimately sanctified for his determination and faith in bringing Christianity to California, he also oversaw a regime that was criticized for decimating the life and culture of Native Americans.

After several years of overhaul, the university renamed two buildings in honor of Native Americans. Serra Hall became Saints Tekakwitha and Serra Hall, a nod to Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American saint.

The Mission Crossroads building, an administrative center for school residences, was renamed Matayuum Crossroads, in reference to the word Kumeyaay for a meeting place.

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