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Persaud et al. urge us to rethink our high regard for Osler in light of his objectionable attitudes toward non-white races and cultures. Instead of idolizing Osler and other white men, we would do better to redirect our sense of who best exemplifies professional virtue to physicians of color who overcame the racism of their times to succeed professionally. This particular brand of iconoclasm has now become a common public ritual, as demands to remove Confederate statues have moved on to attacks on the American founders and on British heroes such as Churchill and Nelson. What these men exemplified, we are told, is racism and white supremacy. If not down the memory hole with them, at least let us see them clearly as the deplorable creatures they were, unworthy of the pedestals we have put them upon.
There is no doubt that white male heroes of the Anglosphere in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries held many attitudes we now rightly find objectionable. It would be odd if they did not, as white racial and Western cultural superiority were unquestioned presumptions in the elite culture of the time. Persaud et al. and others seek to bring our present heightened sensitivity to racism to our cultural inheritance, bringing figures like Osler to the bar of contemporary standards for antiracist virtue and finding them wanting. This project is not wholly misguided. The important figures of our history need to be seen in light of their faults as well as of their accomplishments. And unsung physicians who struggled against the racism of their times should be recognized.
Yet, while it is well to point out that Osler was a man of his time, it is something else to demand that our recognition of his greatness be withdrawn. An important aspect of professional identity is an awareness of history and especially of those professional forbears who reflect the ideals we aspire to in the present. Osler was a physician of towering accomplishment in medical science, in medical education and in medical humanism. He has inspired generations of internists by his dedication to science, his compassion for his patients and his care for his students. That he was a man of his time in regard to race is regrettable but not a reason to banish him from the pantheon—or to banish virtually every other major figure of that time in our history. Race was certainly a blind spot for Western elites of the recent past; what our own blind spots are will no doubt be revealed to posterity. To demand pristine moral purity on the issue of race as a condition for the favorable recognition of great accomplishment is a curiously myopic demand—a failure to acknowledge that there may, or in fact that there will, be motes in our own eyes as we go about our moral lives. Persaud and his colleagues should consider that perhaps particular moral failures are not disqualifying for heroism—or for inclusion in the professional guild. We should all be thankful for that.