We Have to Be Smart

"Dr. William Osler was a giant of the medical field in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was also a fan of the Stoics. He was a deep reader who advised his students to read Shakespeare before bed to clear and refresh their minds. He was one of the founding members of Johns Hopkins University and impacted millions of lives through his research. It was an incredible career that eventually ended, as Marcus Aurelius said of all doctors, on the same humble deathbed that Osler had spent tirelessly working around his whole life."Find out the lesson that Dr. Osler's life and death has for all of us on today's Daily Stoic Podcast.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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  Welcome to The Daily Stoic, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com.

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  We have to be smart. Dr. William Osler was one of the giants of medicine in the late 19th and 20th centuries. He was a fan of the Stoics. He was a deep reader who advised his students to read Shakespeare before bed to clear and refresh their minds. He was one of the founding members of John Hopkins University and impacted millions of lives through his research. It was an incredible career in medicine that eventually ended, as Marcus Aurelius said of all doctors, "on the same humble deathbed that Osler had spent tirelessly working around his whole life." In Osler's case, almost 100 years ago exactly, he caught the Spanish Flu, a deadly pandemic not unlike the one we're

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  experiencing now. "I've been watching this case for two months," he joked, "and I'm sorry, I shall not see the postmortem." He had fallen sick on September 29, 1919. By October 13, his fever was 102. Knowing he was marked to die, he took to quoting Tennyson, one of the authors he'd love to read, although much to his wife's dismay. "Release me and restore me to the ground," he said over and over again. On December 29, 1919, he died. John M. Berry, whose book The Great Influenza is a must-must-read, recounts his last words as "hold up my head." "She had always held his head up high," Berry writes, "but it

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  made no difference." Marcus Aurelius had held his high up too, and still in the end, "none of us are stronger than a virus. It doesn't matter how brilliant we are, it doesn't matter how much philosophy we've read, or how many troops we command." We have to be smart, of course, as Marcus Aurelius and Ossler would expect us to be. Wear a mask, do your research, listen to the experts, be part of the solution, not the problem. Don't contribute to the transmission rate of the pandemic. And of course, also be humble and don't waste this time you have, whether it's at home with your family, or over the phone, or email with friends and colleagues. None of us escapes death in the end. None of us are invincible. So make the most of this moment.

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