Sir – Chris Koenig (Past times, October 15) wonders how serious Sir William Osler was in commending the compulsory euthanasia of elderly men as described in Trollope’s satire on bureaucracy The Fixed Period.
Certainly, Sir William proclaimed that all the best things in the world had been produced by men aged under 40 and all the worst by men aged over 60.
His citing of Trollope was, however, merely an ill-judged attempt at humour — and one that he must have regretted when “oslerization” became for several years a synonym for compulsory euthanasia in the American Press.
His mistake was to produce the jest in a speech in Baltimore USA, where, being Canadian, he did not appreciate that Americans do not “do” irony.
A further irony is that Osler had probably not actually read the book.
There is no mention of chloroform; the proposed method of “transition”, as it was termed in the mythical Republic of Britannula, involved opening certain veins “while the departing one should, under the influence of morphine, be gently entranced in a warm bath”.
Trollope’s book has never been popular in England, possibly because it also satirised cricket.
John Grimley Evans, Professor Emeritus of Clinical Geratology, University of Oxford
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