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Shockingly, we do not seem to have a copy of Osler's Practice of Medicine in our collection. I am positive that there must have been one here at some point. Surely the good Sir William Osler himself must have given a copy? But as I've searched the shelves in the stacks, I've never some across one.

After my trip to McGill, I realized that I needed to rectify that omission. So I put in a query for the book on Ebay and came up with a copy that hit all of the right buttons. It was old and it was inexpensive!

The copy is dated 1894, and is apparently a second edition copy. It's missing its back cover, but that's okay.

There's a penciled note on one page of James Wilson Fox of Buffalo, NY.  I can't quite decipher whether there's a date above or below it.

There was a Dr. Fox in the area close to Buffalo, but he disappears in the 1920's.

This copy seems also to have been the property of Dr. Oscar J. Eichhorn who was at the University of Maryland in 1917-1918. His delightful bookplate was on the front cover. 

And there is also a note indicating it was a birthday present to "Dad" on June 29, 1954. 

As I mentioned, I bought the book on eBay from a seller in Kentucky, so who knows where he got it.

But what really matters is that there's now a copy at MedChi once again. It will have a special place in the Krause Room, which was originally the Reading Room. 

Although Osler would not have had the chance to spend time in this room, he talked at several times about how much it meant to him to be with older and younger physicians discussing medicine and sharing information.