B A U M A N R A R E B O O K S S U M M E R 2 0 2 3 33 SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY, THE 1904 INGERSOLL LECTURE, INSCRIBED BY WILLIAM OSLER 33. OSLER, William. Science and Immortality. The Ingersoll Lecture, 1904. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mi%in and Company, 1904. Slim 12mo, original blue cloth, top edge gilt. Housed in a custom clamshell box. $4500 Presentation "rst edition of the text of Osler's Ingersoll Lecture for 1904, inscribed by him on the front !yleaf in the year of publication, "With sincere regards, Wm. Osler, xii.3.04." From the esteemed medical book collection of Irving Samuel Cutter, M.D., with his bookplate. Professor of clinical medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and later the !rst chief of medicine at Johns Hopkins, Osler was "one of the bright stars of medical North America" (ANB). Osler's 1892 The Principles and Practice of Medicine was "one of the most in"uential textbooks of general medicine ever written" (Hook & Norman). Osler's Ingersoll lecture proposes that there are three principal approaches that people take toward the question of immortality—which is to say the Christian concept of life after death (rather than actually living beyond the human life span). "He had agonized over it perhaps more than any of his previous addresses and it was rewritten and redrafted many times… He made as a framework the triple classi!cation of mankind into the Laodiceans who accept a belief in immortality, yet live their lives unin"uenced by it; the Gallionians who put the supernatural altogether out of their lives; and the Teresians with whom this faith is the controlling in"uence" (Cushing, Life of Sir William Osler, 638). Not long after delivering this lecture on "immortality," Osler accepted the prestigious position of regius professor at Oxford University. In his 1905 farewell remarks at Johns Hopkins, Osler referenced Anthony Trollope's novel The Fixed Period (1882), a satirical dystopian work that proposes euthanasia as a radical solution to the problem of the aged. "Evidently Osler used the idea in a lighthearted attempt to persuade his American colleagues that they should not mourn his departure… His attempt at humor failed. The American yellow press claimed that Osler seriously proposed that older persons be chloroformed. He could not have been more misjudged, having always been supportive of the aged, whether family, friends, or patients… Some plans to memorialize him in Baltimore were canceled. Brie"y, the verb 'to oslerize' came into use as a synonym for 'to kill by chloroforming'" (ANB). Without exceptionally scarce original dust jacket. Biblioteca Osleriana 5250. Bookplate and booklabel of Irving S. Cutter (1875-1945), Dean of the Northwestern University Medical School, physician, author, and renowned collector of medical books. A very nearly !ne inscribed presentation copy with a nice medical provenance.
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