The life of Sir William Osler / by Harvey Cushing.

  • Cushing, Harvey, 1869-1939.
Date:
1925
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The life of Sir William Osler / by Harvey Cushing. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the new art of amateur photography. To this, posterity is indebted for a chance picture of some of these children dressed in their homespuns, with a restless child, William, at the end of the line. A few years later another incident occurred at a picnic in the Cavillers’ woods. The children were gathering firewood, and Willie, armed with a hatchet, was engaged in chopping the faggots into lengths on a stump. His sister ‘ Chattie ’ to tease him would put her small hand on the stump, and finally he said he would count three, and if she didn’t take it off she would lose a finger. She lost it, fortunately only a tip, and brother Willie disappeared to the hay-loft—from which he was extracted some hours later—to escape the punishment to which he was entitled, on the appeal of his still devoted sister and playmate. . , . . The elders, strict as they may have been with their children, were not given to corporal punishment, and this boy in particular, impulsive and full of mischief as he con¬ tinually was, was so forgiving and affectionate that he probably escaped many a deserved wigging. His elder brother Frank relates that the onus for many of his own escapades was apt to be voluntarily shouldered by Willie, and that the younger brother once deservedly _ gave him a black eye for some offence, but subsequently shielded him before their parents and took the blame himself for the quarrel. In a family of children essentially unselfish and generous with their small possessions,. Willie even as a boy was quick to give the last penny of his scant pocket-money to another who might be hard up. In an address given in Glasgow fifty years later, bn William drew upon his early memories of these days for this following comparison: The most vivid recollections of my boyhood in Canada cluster about the happy spring days when we went off to the bush to make maple sugar—the bright sunny days, the delicious cold nights, the camp-fires, the log cabins, and the fascinating work tapping the trees, putting in the birch-bark spouts, arranging the troughs, and then going from tree to tree, collecting in pails the clear sweet sap. 1 ‘ Pathological Institute of a General Hospital.’ Glasgow Medical Journal, Nov. 1911, p. 15-