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Library Reviews: Episode 1 – The McLibrary

by Iain Macdonald on

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www.library.mcgill.ca

Everyone has a favorite study spot on campus, from the Schulich Stacks to the Trottier Terminals. What makes that spot their favorite varies from person to person. Some people like a comfortable chair to curl up in and read, and others like a place to go when nothing else is open at 3 A.M.. However, most people have only been to three or four of the many libraries on campus and have only heard rumors of the others.

What about the other twenty libraries – how do they fare against their more popular counterparts? To attempt to answer this question, I’m going to visit each library and study there for an hour or two. I will share my thoughts and feelings, and provide a review of the library. I’ll be ranking the libraries in several categories including: noise level, accessibility, study setup, facilities, décor, and overall appeal. Each category will be ranked out of five, with five being the best and one the worst. I’ll also provide additional useful information about the library and some tips.

McLennan is best known as the main university library, although it primarily serves humanities and social science students. At the south end of lower field, it towers several stories over Sherbrooke Street, straddling the border between campus and the real world. McLennan houses the rare books collection, as well as the government information service. When your friends hit “the library,” they often mean McLennan.

 

Noise Level – McLennan is almost always busy. During peak hours it can be a nightmare to find a seat. With desks everywhere and Arts students studying furiously, the sound of page-turning, sniffling, and iPhone buzzing can turn the library’s ambiance into a dull roar. Typically, when people have to make a phone call, they are courteous enough to use the central open space. Bottom-Line : The silence at McLennan isn’t so golden (3/5).

 

Accessibility – With six sprawling floors, McLennan is a big library. It’s not hard to get to either. Easily recognizable from almost anywhere on campus, McLennan is at the corner of Sherbrooke and MacTavish. As one of the main libraries on campus, its hours are pretty good, including twenty-four hours a day from now until the end of exams, with shorter hours earlier in the term. Bottom-Line : Easy to find and always open (5/5).

 

Study Setup – The desks and chairs at McLennan are a mixed bunch. Last year they replaced a number of the old carrels with new equipment. However, on some floors the old tables and carrels remain. While the spacious, generally unoccupied tables are great for reading or outlining, they don’t have outlets. The new desks are quite nice, with electrical outlets and dividers between each desk. However, they’re tightly packed. The first floor has several desks worth of computers for those without laptops. Bottom-Line: The new desks present on some floors are great. There’s a reason the older carrels upstairs are frequently empty (4/5).

 

Facilities – Adjacent to the Redpath cafeteria, and only a short walk from downtown shops including Second Cup and Booster Juice, as well as the Management Café, McLennan has no shortage of food options, some of which don’t require you to leave the building. With bathrooms on every floor, and no shortage of Sean Turner jokes, you won’t need to leave your work for long. However, the bathrooms are not the most inviting on campus. Bottom-Line: McLennan has a number of food options that are fast. The bathrooms are accessible, but you won’t want to linger too long (5/5).

 

Décor -McLennan doesn’t draw studiers because of its beautiful design. The abundance of grey concrete used in the library’s construction is almost nauseating. If you’re lucky enough to get a window seat looking over campus, the view is great, just try not to look the other way too much. Bottom-Line: Colourful furniture doesn’t do much to disguise the bland, depressing setting. (2/5)

 

Overall Appeal – When it’s time to buckle down, McLennan is a great place to look for a study spot – don’t arrive too late though, and bring your headphones. The library is a stereotypical university library, with rows and rows of books and tables scattered around the edges. Once you sit down, you’re sure to get some serious work done, as distractions are generally limited. While the library has more Mac Books than the Apple store, some people still go there to read books. Bottom-Line: McLennan’s main appeal is the typical library scenario it offers, which is sure to put even the most unmotivated student into a working mood. (4/5)

 

Total Score: 23/30 [1st]

 

Strengths: Accessibility, Facilities

 

Weaknesses: Décor, Noise Level

 

About the Reviewer: I’m a fourth year software engineering student in the faculty of engineering. That means that most of my schoolwork time is spent doing assignments. I get between two and three assignments per week, usually involving coding, or some sort of mathematics. It’s not often that I have to do readings for school. I like to listen to music when I study, and I do almost all of my work on the computer. The things I look for in a study-space are comfort, computer-friendliness, and an attractive setting.

Behind the Bench, Sports

Dengue, typhoid, and a lesson learned

by Gabe Pulver on

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By virtually any measure, last month’s 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi were a complete disaster. A small budget wasn’t the issue but rather a large one was. With a cost of 30,000 Crore (300 billion Rupees), or close to $7 billion USD, they were easily the most expensive Commonwealth Games ever. They cost as much as any Olympic Games, except of course for the Beijing Games in 2008. All this money, and India has a 35 per cent poverty rate. But that’s another issue.

Right before the games began, the athletes’ villages had flooded, rendering many of the dormitories uninhabitable. Then, a pedestrian bridge leading to the stadium collapsed. There have been rumours of unsafe and unregulated working conditions, including child labour and a meningitis outbreak amongst construction workers. In a country with strict labour laws and a stable economy, none of these things would have happened. I’m not suggesting that large athletic events should be entirely westernized: I’m merely proposing that they should be safe.

In May, the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) decided that their athletes competing in Delhi would arrive in India just in time for their specific events, and then return straight home. If they missed a ceremony or a teammate’s competition, tough luck. It was clear that the COC didn’t believe that the Indian Games would be a success, and would be participating in only the most literal and passive way. In short, the COC felt that the conditions would be poor, the city dangerous, and the experience detrimental for the athletes.

The Indian Olympic Committee, as well as many Canadian and Indian pundits, was incensed. While India was offended, Canada was right.

We can ignore the one Canadian athlete who returned home with typhoid fever. We can assume that he didn’t get the shots required to travel to India. But what we can’t ignore is the accusation that tainted water in the swimming pool led to dozens of athletes being poisoned. We can’t ignore the story of Annamay Pierse, a Canadian athlete and 2012 medal hopeful, who will lose significant time from her competitive prime because she returned home with Dengue fever, a disease so rare there have only been a handful of reported cases in Canada and the U.S. in the last half-century. It’s a disease that’s been used in the past by the U.S. as a form of biological warfare. An athlete catching the bug in competition is simply unacceptable.

While this may seem trivial in isolation, consider that Brazil, the host of the 2016 Olympic Games, is the world’s leading centre for Dengue outbreak, amongst other exotic diseases. It’s extremely important for all countries to have equal opportunity to compete on an international level. Nonetheless, that doesn’t diminish the right of every competitor to be safe.

The experience in Delhi bodes poorly for both the Rio 2016 Olympics and every future Olympics held in the developing world. The Delhi debacle is proof that a Third World Olympic dream is just that. Some will argue that South Africa’s success at the World Cup proves that other developing countries are viable hosts for an event this big. The World Cup and the Olympics, however, are incomparable in logistical difficulty. The World Cup holds a maximum of four events per day, spread out in cities all over the country, where there are many smaller local governments and individual logistical hurdles to cross. An Olympic Games features 17 days of over 120 hours of competition per day. If Delhi and India can’t handle an event half this size, how will Rio cope with the real deal? Many point to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil as an Olympic audition. Trust me, the two aren’t even close.

Sports

Redmen return to winning ways with blowout victory

by Walker Kitchens on

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Alice Walker
Alice Walker

Coming off of their first loss in 16 games, the Redmen rugby team responded with an authoritative 69-10 victory over the Sherbrooke Vert-et-Or in the Quebec University Rugby League men’s semifinal on Friday afternoon. It was a dominant performance by the entire McGill team, who scored early and often to quickly put the game out of Sherbrooke’s reach.

The Redmen were motivated to put their October 24 loss to Concordia behind them. They played intensely, physically dictating the play. Centre Sam Skulsky scored two minutes into the game and wing Gideon Balloch followed with a successful conversion. McGill didn’t  let up, scoring seven consecutive tries in the first half and leading 45-0 at the break.

“We took practice a lot more seriously after the loss,” said wing Brendan O’Sullivan, who scored two points off a successful conversion. “We realized that we had some competition in this league and we needed to start taking things more seriously. We just put our goals against Sherbrooke to match them man to man physically and play them really intense. When we play to that level and play with that intensity and that passion, our talent comes through and we can pile on the points.”

Balloch echoed the sentiment, saying that the team was extremely focused, hoping to start the playoffs on the right note.

“Everyone was really motivated [coming into the game],” he said. “We had lost our last regular season game so it was a return to form for us. We scored within the first two minutes: [that was] pretty impressive. Just overall the team worked better together. We worked back and forth better than we had all year. We hardly ever let up, it was really good.”

Balloch led the Redmen charge with an incredible 22 points. He scored two tries and added six conversions, but he was quick to attribute his individual success to the entire team’s effort.

“I was just lucky,” he humbly explained. “Because I kick for the team, when [the team] score[s] a lot of tries [I end up] scor[ing] a lot of points out there. I also finished with two tries that were set up by my teammates. I think everyone who scored tries had to credit their teammates.”

O’Sullivan was not as quick to attribute Balloch’s success to luck.

“One thing Gideon brings to the table is consistency and effort,” he said. “His kicks are spot on and that doesn’t come from nowhere. He practices his kicking every practice and he loves to kick. He’s always giving it 100 per cent, really running hard, running his lines.”

The McGill offence was running on all cylinders on Friday as seven different players scored tries. The team’s defence was equally impressive as they shut out Sherbrooke in the first half to ensure that a comeback was not in the cards.

A scary moment occurred in the second half when the game had to be postponed for 30 minutes as a Sherbrooke player left the game with a serious neck injury. Even though McGill earned a yellow card for the incident, Balloch explained that he didn’t “think [the hit] was meant to be malicious.”

McGill now heads to the QURL final against the Concordia Stingers. Concordia won 13-12 over Bishop’s in the other semifinal to set up a rematch with McGill. In the regular season the Stingers ended McGill’s 15-game winning streak with a 17-10 victory. The Redmen are excited to get the chance to avenge their only conference loss of the season.

“We’re definitely looking forward to playing Concordia,” Balloch said. “I’m glad Concordia won. Playing them again is something we want to do.”

The Redmen are confident that a rematch with the Stingers will turn out differently if they play like they did against the Vert-et-Or.

“We just have to match [Concordia] physically man to man and play with the intensity that we played against Sherbrooke,” explained O’Sullivan. “We cannot give up silly penalties and [we have to] play really, really hard defence and then look for the offensive opportunities to create themselves.”

“We’ll be practicing five times this week,” said Balloch. “So we’ll have a lot of time this week to get everything down and as perfect as we can for the finals.”

Sports

McGill shocked to miss nationals

by Walker Kitchens on

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Holly Stewart
Holly Stewart

The Martlets’ impressive, undefeated season ended in heartbreak on Friday night at Molson Stadium. McGill was ranked third in the country before the visiting underdogs from Laval ruined the Martlets hopes of completing their undefeated season with a Conference and National Championship. The Rouge-et-Or won the hard-fought Quebec University Soccer League semifinal 2-1 after Mélissande Guy scored the winning goal in the 75th minute.

“We failed,” said Martlet Head Coach Marc Mounicot in an email to the Tribune. “We had the chance two times in one week to qualify to this national competition and we missed.”

From the beginning of the game, McGill controlled the tempo. The Martlets applied intense pressure for the first 20 minutes but were unable to find the back of the net. Their closest chance to breaking the deadlock came in the 20th minute when they hit the crossbar off a cross from a set piece.

Just three minutes later, the Rouge-et-Or opened the scoring. Maroua Chebbi scored off a rebound, putting the underdogs from Laval in front 1-0.

McGill didn’t remain behind for long as they quickly responded with a beautiful goal. Midfielder Meghan Bourque flew down the left wing in the 26th minute and found a wide-open Hannah Rivkin with a precise pass. Rivkin calmly sniped the bottom right corner to tie the game 1-1.  

“We scored a beautiful equalizer on plays that we have all season long,” Mounicot said.

The first half ended in a tie, but McGill had grabbed the momentum with the tying goal. The Martlets came flying out to start the second half by creating many scoring chances, but they were unable to solve the Laval defence. With 27 minutes left in the game, star striker Alexandra Morin-Boucher, who led the QUSL with 11 goals, was taken down in the box, but no penalty was called. Two minutes later Morin-Boucher found herself all alone on a breakaway but wasn’t able to score and push the Martlets ahead.

McGill continued to press hard, but in the 75th minute Laval’s Mélissande Guy scored the game-winner on a quick counter attack. It was Laval’s second goal, after only taking three shots.

The Martlets controlled the game as they created better scoring chances and had a large edge in possession. Ultimately, McGill was unable to finish their plays while Laval executed when it mattered.

“Such games are played on details and making sure that you avoid defensive errors and finish your chances and we did not achieve on both domains,” explained Mounicot. “Laval played a perfect game defensively, their back line was solid all night. Yes, there was perhaps a [penalty] on Morin Boucher and we hit the crossbar again in the first half but Laval had three shots and scored two goals. The late Laval goal was a killer.”

McGill frantically searched for the equalizing goal in the closing minutes but came up empty. As the final whistle sounded the Martlets stood in shock. Many players left the field sobbing after their undefeated season ended so abruptly and disappointingly.

“The morale of the team last night was very down and it will take time to regroup,” Mounicot said. “We will have to work two times more over the winter season not to face such situations in the near future. We need to win the big games when pressure is on.”

Despite the loss, the season shouldn’t be seen as a failure. The Martlets are an extremely talented young team with only one player in her fourth year of eligibility. Their youth didn’t hold them back all season as they finished with an incredible 9-0-5 conference and 15-1-6 overall record.

 “We had a great season overall,” Mounicot said. “But missing CIS will be in our head for the next few weeks.”

Look for the young Martlets to learn from their defeat and mature into a national powerhouse next year when the CIS Championships will be held at McGill. The older Martlets should be one of the favourites to win next year’s nationals on their home field.

Sports

Around the Water Cooler

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For those of you who don’t keep TSN as your home page or Sports Illustrated as your bedtime reading, we know sports can be hard to understand, this section is for you.

 

In case you’ve been living under a sporting rock…

Baseball: The San Francisco Giants won the Major League Baseball World Series last week.  It was a big deal: the Giants hadn’t won a World Series since 1954, when they were based in New York. In celebration, people burned cars. Montreal isn’t so special after all.

Golf: Tiger Woods, of sex scandal fame, is also a very good golfer. Or at least he was; he just finished the first winless season of his career.

NCAA Football: This is something people in the United States care about and it’s kind of crazy—Wikipedia it sometime. If someone asks you about it for now, just show off your knowledge that the fourth-ranked TCU Horned Frogs demolished number six Utah 47-7, and Alabama’s national title hopes were extinguished when they lost to Louisiana State.

You lost me at fly half…

Rugby: Not many people in Canada understand how the scoring in rugby works. Here’s a brief explanation. In rugby there are three ways to score; a try, a conversion, and a penalty. When a player breaks the plane of the goal-line (like a touchdown in football) and grounds the ball (touches the ball to the ground) they are awarded a try. A try is worth five points. After a try the team kicks a conversion. A successful conversion has to go through the goal posts and is worth two points. Finally, there are penalties. If a penalty is awarded by the referee, the team that is granted the penalty has the option to kick the ball from the spot of the foul. A successful penalty conversion kick goes through the goal posts and gets three points for the kicking team.

Roughriders, Rouges and Regulations

Canadian Football: This one is for all the Americans. Canadian Football League rules include: a 110-yard field rather than the standard 100 yards, 12 players rather than 11, three downs instead of four, a Grey Cup instead of a Super Bowl, and the rouge. The rouge is a single point, given for kicking the ball through the opponent’s endzone. It led to some pretty funny late game action in Toronto recently, so YouTube it. Finally, the CFL practices inclusivity by allowing six teams in the eight-team league to make for the playoffs. Until 1996, the league also allowed two teams to share the name “Roughriders.” That means one quarter of the league shared the same name.

Sports

Comeback win keeps undefeated season alive

by John Wilcock on

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Alice Walker
Holly Stewart

The McGill Redmen hockey team (10-0-0) kept their perfect season alive as they came from behind to beat a pesky Nipissing Lakers (4-4-2) 5-3 on Saturday night at McConnell Arena. Francis Verreault-Paul led the gritty McGill comeback with his fourth hat trick and 16th-18th goals of the season.

Verreault-Paul tallied an early goal one minute into the first frame, but the Redmen struggled to generate any significant offence for the remainder of the period. A night after a dominant 9-2 victory against the University of Toronto Varsity Blues, McGill looked like a different team early against the Nipissing Lakers.

“We knew we were having an off night as a group,” said McGill Head Coach Kelly Nobes. “Our execution wasn’t good, we were flat, we didn’t have great legs … It was a challenge, a bit of adversity.”

 McGill has looked dominant thus far this season, coming off strong wins against Queen’s and RMC, but struggled early against Nippising. In a valiant attempt to topple the CIS’s second ranked Redmen, the Lakers played a strategic game.

Nipissing controlled the neutral zone throughout the first period and held McGill to only nine shots. Nipissing’s Kevin Rebelo and Paul Cianfrini both scored in the first to put the Lakers up 2-1. Defenceman Cianfrini’s go-ahead marker came  6:42 into the first frame from a point shot that found it’s way through traffic and beat McGill goalie Antoine Tardif. Nipissing peppered freshman goaltender Tardif with 13 shots throughout the first. Tardif, who started the season with an impressive 3-0, didn’t have his strongest outing of the year on Saturday.

Early in the second, Nipissing caught McGill on a bad line change with a quick transition goal from Connor O’Donnell to put the Lakers up 3-1. This marked the end of the night for Tardif as Hubert Morin replaced him. Morin played stellar, making key saves to keep the Redmen’s comeback hopes alive.

“He had to make some good saves and it was great that he was able to come off the bench and be able to do that,” said Nobes.

Following a great penalty kill for too many men on the ice from captain Evan Vossen and proverbial leader Francis Verreault-Paul, McGill was able to shift the tides of the game.

“We didn’t want out winning streak to end,” said alternate captain Marc-Andre Dorian. “Midway through the second, we got more confident with the puck.”

 Verreault-Paul finally cracked Nipissing goaltender Matt Hache 12:08 into the second. Francis drove wide and forced Nipissing’s defender to lose his stick by cutting to the net. McGill capitalized with some great puck movement in front between Andrew Wright and Alexandre Picard-Hooper, and though Hache was well-positioned and made the initial save, Verreault-Paul buried the second attempt on a cross-ice feed.

“Pic [Picard-Hooper] and Wrighty [Wright] have good chemistry and they seem to be able to find each other. It’s great for Francis and it’s great for the team,” said Nobes of his top scoring line.

McGill built on their momentum and came out strong in the third period after coach Nobes talked to his players about execution in the second intermission.

“[The coaching staff] said to keep things really simple, put the puck on the net,” said Dorion.

Guillaume Doucet, Maxime Langelier-Parent, Marc-Andre Daneau had two great pressure shifts in the early goings of the third, culminating in a game-tying goal as Langelier-Parent put home a rebound at 9:47. McGill threw 19 shots on net and generated many scoring chances in the third period.

To the delight of the 300 plus attendees, McGill took the lead midway through the final stanza. Following a poor clearance from Nipissing, Marc-Andre Dorion held the point and got the puck to Picard-Hooper, who fired a shot that was turned away by Hache. Verreault-Paul, who cut from the point to the net, potted the rebound for his hat trick and scored his 18th goal of the season.

McGill, now 10-0, is off to its best start ever. Coach Nobes plans on improving practice habits and work on their struggling power play in order to prepare for a young Ryerson Rams team on November 11 and 12 at MacDonald Campus. McGill is confident in their game and will look to continue their domination of the Ontario University Association Eastern Conference.

“We don’t really care who we’re facing it’s just our game that we want to play and we’ll try and impose that,” said Dorion.

Sports

QUHL win streak now 86 games

by John Hui on

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Alice Walker
Alice Walker

In Sunday’s matchup between the McGill Martlets and the Carleton Ravens, captain Cathy Chartrand carried McGill, scoring twice en route to a 6-1 victory. The win extended McGill’s undefeated streak against QUHL opponents to an impressive 86 games and improved their all-time head-to-head record against Carleton to a dominant 53-0-1.

While the score mimicked McGill’s last victory against Carleton, the play was noticeably different. Carleton played harder and pressured the Martlets more. Unfortunately for the Ravens, hard work alone wasn’t enough. Centre Olivia Sutter was injured blocking a shot from McGill defenceman Stacie Tardif, which resulted in a goal by Lainie Smith. Three other players also suffered various injuries during the game.

McGill got off to a roaring start when Jordanna Peroff put her team up one just 8:54 into the game. Chartrand and sniper Ann-Sophie Bettez also contributed to put McGill up 3-0 by the end of the first period.

In the second period, however, momentum began to shift. The Martlets were often caught flat-footed and were complacent in their own zone. Consequently, Carleton was able to put more shots on net and keep the play in McGill’s zone. Ravens defenceman Victoria Gouge scored the only goal in the period, slipping the puck low pad side by a besieged Charline Labonte.

“We played a very disappointing second period,” said Head Coach Peter Smith. “We just sat there and watched the play develop. Luckily, the girls picked it up in the third.”

Chartrand led the way, blasting a hard shot past Ravens netminder Victoria Powers to make the game 4-1. She also shut down play in her own zone and led the Martlet’s transition attack. The team responded to her example and were noticeably faster on the puck after the goal.

“Cathy just held us accountable for our play that period. She told us we were off our game and we had to step it up,” forward Leslie Oles said. “We really respect what she has to say. She is our hardest worker and as a rookie, I just try to take in as much as possible.”

Chartrand’s two-goal night improved her total to nine points, which leads the CIS among blueliners.

When asked about the key to her offence, she just shrugged and said, “It’s always been a part of my game. I have a hard shot and I like to use it. This year though, I have learned to pick my spots better, so that’s probably why I am scoring more.”

The Martlets will try to extend their QUHL winning streak Saturday against the University of Montreal at 8 p.m. at McConnell Arena.

Features

William Osler: the Legacy of a Great Canadian

by Alison Bailey on

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“The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.”

    

– William Osler

 

When a young William Osler was attending medical school at McGill University in the early 1870s, the existing body of medical knowledge was increasingly being called into question. The discoveries of bacteria and insulin were revolutionizing medical treatments, effectively putting ancient practices such as bloodletting and homeopathy to an end. Until his death in 1919, Osler was at the forefront of this reformation, helping to transform medical schools into what they are today.

“Osler was not single-handedly responsible, but was certainly the flag bearer of a reform movement in medical education that was to make medical education scientific,” said McGill history of medicine and science professor Faith Wallis. “[This reform movement] was going to change this antiquated and inadequate medical system, and was going to bring it up to speed with new scientific discoveries.”

The changes Osler proposed were not easily implemented, however. Wallis explained that because medicine is not limited to a scientific paradigm, changing the system is a complex process.

“Medicine is indeed a science, but because medicine is also an art and a practice that happens between doctor and patient, change is very complicated in the medical world,” she said.

When Osler died in 1919, he left approximately 8,000 books to McGill, a collection that he had been avidly building up since his early years in Montreal. The Bibliotheca Osleriana, located on the third floor of the McIntyre Medical Building, now holds this collection and is a symbol of his legacy.

 

The Professor

 

By the age of 25, Osler was a medical professor at McGill. He then went on to be the chair of clinical medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and shortly thereafter went to John Hopkins to work at both the university and the hospital. He ended his career at Oxford as Regius chair of medicine.

What made Osler unique were, among other things, his teaching methods and his beliefs about how a physician should be educated. Osler believed that lectures could only cover a fraction of what medical students should be learning. According to Wallis, prior to Osler’s advances it was conventional that “many students never saw the inside of a hospital.”

Richard Fraser, McGill Professor of Pathology and a pathologist at the Royal Victoria Hospital, elaborated on another of Osler’s beliefs, the union of university and hospital.

“Shortly before he died, he wrote letters to McGill saying that they needed to modernize and build a closer association between the university and the hospital to develop teaching methods,” Fraser said.

Although this was something Osler had been developing during his time in Montreal, there was still a long way to go until a mandatory medical residency would be fully implemented at McGill.

Osler’s dedication to teaching is evident from a story Wallis recounted of his time at the University of Pennsylvania. While conducting an autopsy on a patient, Osler told his students to gather around and observe. He told them that he had diagnosed the patient as having died of disease X, but that if they looked carefully at certain anatomical characteristics that could be observed post-mortem, he had been incorrect. Instead the patient had died of disease Y. Wallis paraphrased Osler telling his students, “I really blew it, now you take note of this and don’t you ever make the same mistake.”

The student who recorded this event was shocked that a professor would so openly admit his mistakes. With this act, he brought himself to the students’ level, demonstrating that learning was not only for the student but for the professor as well.  

“He believed in teaching by example, and by his own example what he wanted to model for them was intellectual honesty,” Wallis said. “If you don’t learn from your mistakes, how can you learn from your successes?”

 

The Individual

 

Osler’s accomplishments extended beyond his professional and academic careers; his sincerity and earnestness did not end when he left the classroom. Letters and testimonials compiled after his death show that very few people who knew Osler did not like him. However, with the passing of time, history is romanticized and the dead are often glorified. Did Osler have any vices? Award-winning author and renowned historian Michael Bliss wrote the second biography on Osler.

“Virtually everybody who knew Osler idolized him, and you say to yourself, ‘Oh well surely that’s an exaggeration.’ The trouble that I found as a biographer was that going through private correspondence that was never meant to be seen by anyone you still found this adulation of Osler, which is really, truly remarkable,” Bliss said.

According to Bliss, Osler thought of medicine as his vocation. Osler believed that “once you had become a doctor, you lived, breathed, ate, slept, and drank medicine, it was your full-time profession.”

This brings us to Osler’s bedside manner. He was able to remain calm and emotionless as a doctor, no matter how deep his personal or emotional involvement in a case. Wallis told one story involving a young girl who was on her deathbed. Osler sat by her side and comforted her, but as he left and was walking down the hall, he started whistling. When asked by his colleagues how he could emit such a merry tune, Osler apparently responded “I whistle so that I do not weep.”

 

A Lasting Legacy?

 

Differences from original Oslerian practice have developed since the beginning of the 20th century.

Osler and some of his contemporaries openly admitted to their mistakes, noting them down transparently in reports. Current physicians do not openly admit to mistakes at the risk of having malpractice suits filed against them. Instead, medical students are taught to present options to their patients. In this way, the relationship between doctor and patient has evolved since Osler’s day. Patients have become more educated, and there is no longer a sense that the doctor knows best.

Additionally, the doctor’s priority seems to have shifted from his patient to his family.

“Osler’s generation of physicians thought that your obligation to your patient was that you’re with them every hour of the day and night that you’re needed,” Bliss said.

Yet despite an obvious and inevitable evolution of the medical system over the course of almost a century, Osler’s ideals are still very relevant today. Osler Fellows, positions created four years ago in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill, are a concrete example of how his impact is still felt.

“Osler Fellows are meant to help the students make the transition from being a student who doesn’t know anything about medicine to a physician who deals with patients,” Fraser said.

 

The Library

 

According to Pamela Miller, the history of medicine librarian at McGill’s Osler Library, Osler chose to leave his collection to the school because this is where he built his reputation.

“He said in his will that he was giving it to the Faculty of Medicine in gratitude for their support of him as a student and as a professor,” Miller said. “Their support of him gave him faith in himself which he thought was the best form of education.”

Canadian architect Percy Nobbs and Osler’s wife Grace Revere worked diligently for the decade after Osler’s death to build a place that would hold his books, and in some ways his legacy. The library was originally housed in the Strathcona building, but was moved to the McIntyre Medical Building in the 1960s.

Thanks to donors, the library’s collection now boast
s about 100,000 rare books. The library is also home to both Mr. and Mrs. Osler’s ashes.

Some of the pieces the library has come by are priceless and irreplaceable. These include a collection of Thomas Browne’s multi-volume the Religio Medici, a facsimile of McGill’s oldest diploma, and literary works that date as far back as the eighth century. Osler’s goal for the library was to collect the great works of medicine, and to potentially create a curriculum for medical students.

Osler’s influence ranges far and wide; people come from all over the world to visit his library, a sort of Mecca for Oslerians. Christopher Lyons has been the liaison librarian for the Osler Library for the past six years and has seen many different people come to visit.

“When I started working here, I started to appreciate the extent to which Osler was influential in medicine in the space of about one week,” Lyons said.

The first three people that came to the library when Lyons started working there came from opposite ends of the world, from Australia, Brazil, and Japan.

In one way or another, Osler had inspired these people and had brought them all to the Bibliotheca Osleriana.

“They all came from thousands of miles away. What’s driven them to this place?” asked Lyons.

The Bibliotheca Osleriana is locked at all times, but the librarians are wonderfully welcoming and will gladly give curious students a guided tour. They are also hoping to open this part of the library as a study space for students sometime after Christmas.

 

 

Even if Osler graduated over a century ago, McGill is be proud to call one of the greatest Canadian physicians, and perhaps even one of the greatest Canadians, one of their own. In Bliss’s words, Osler was the doctor’s doctor, but his message that learning is a continuous process can be extended beyond the medical profession.

“As people said after his death,” Bliss concluded “This truly was an unusual and remarkable life.”

News

News in Brief

by Noah Caldwell-Refferty on

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Despite a series of significant financial setbacks so far, the Arts Undergraduate Society President Dave Marshall is still optimistic about the coming year.

Navigating the issues, Marshall said, requires the AUS to renew its vision and reinforce its principal duties.  

“Yes, it’s an unusual year, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a bad year,” he said. “It’s a re-imagining,”

For example,  AUS has launched an initiative to coordinate with companies which are in the interest of students and students’ futures.  

“Companies find the Faculty of Arts a great place for recruiting students, and students benefit a lot from information about where they can get job opportunities,” Marshall said.

Elements of this strategy are already in place. Last week’s Bar des Arts was co-sponsored by Rogers, which ran a contest that included a Blackberry as a prize.

At the practical level, AUS is automating and digitizing some tasks, such as bookkeeping, to reduce overhead.

“We’re getting smart with a lot of the things we do, to reduce redundancy and streamline our processes,” Marshall said.

Marshall emphasized, however, that the AUS prioritizes the student body over innovations.

“We’re students first, not necessarily politicians,” he said. “The AUS is big in and of itself, but we’re nothing without our departments.  Our success comes from their success. We need to find a way which ensures that we are financially stable while not detracting from the ability of our department associations to make progress.”  

AUS has invested in an online collaborative tool comparable to the WebCT system, called ARTSNET, for the departmental associations to use.

Marshall emphasized that regardless of budgeting concerns, student amenities will not be hurt.  

“There are a lot of expenses that we have to face that are significant,” he said. “Things like our contributions to the Arts Student Employment Fund. We’re not going to reneg on that because it’s something that’s good for the students.”

Problems with AUS Frosh and a federal back-tax collection have caused AUS’ financial difficulties.

“It’s come to the point where this year many issues have come to their maturity, with an expiration date, and now we have to deal with everything,” said Marshall.  

However, Marshall views the obstacles as opportunities to better understand which organizational and financial strategies work best for the AUS.

“This year allows us to wipe our slate clean,” Marshall said. “I think it’s a really powerful year for us.

News

Architecture Cafe was projected to lose $73,000 in ’10-’11

by Theo Meyer on

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McGill’s Board of Governors made public several documents last week regarding this summer’s closure of the Architecture Café, including some of the financial figures that protesting students have been asking for.

The documents revealed, among other things, that the café had lost more than $15,000 last year and was projected to lose more than $73,000 this academic year.

Students’ Society President Zach Newburgh had requested a report about the café’s closure at the Board of Governors meeting on September 28, which Stuart Cobbett, the board’s chairman, then asked Deputy Provost (Student Life and Learning) Morton Mendelson’s office to provide. The resulting memorandum, sent to the Board of Governors on October 22 and made public last week, details the McGill administration’s decision to shut down the popular student-managed café.  

According to the financial information in an appendix to the memo, the Architecture Café roughly broke even last year, aside from the money allocated to McGill Food and Dining Services, which managed the café jointly with the Architecture students. If the Food and Dining Services contributions are included, the café lost $15.

This year’s projected $73,211 loss would have resulted from the hiring of a full-time manager for $49,200 to replace its five part-time student managers.

While he agreed that the hire made sense, Newburgh said that the administration had failed to exhaust all its options before closing the café.

“Clearly, if we were facing financial deficits, we needed to ensure sustainability by raising prices,” he said. “According to calculations, if you raised prices by about 50 per cent, you would have seen the projected deficit disappear.”

Carly Roualt, a former manager of the café who has been a vocal opponent of its closure, declined to comment for this article.

Despite the release of the documents, Newburgh said that SSMU would continue its efforts to reverse the administration’s decision to shut down the café.

“We’re still going to be pushing for the reopening of the Architecture Café,” he said.

The documents also describe much of the history of student-run food services on campus.

According to the report and a subsequent interview with Mendelson, student-run food services first cropped up on campus in the early 1990s. Partly in response to massive financial cuts, the university struck memorandums of agreement (MoAs) with several student groups on campus which allowed them to set up food operations.

In the late 1990s, however, the university decided to retake control over food services on campus, citing problems with the student-run operations such as liability risks. As various student groups’ MoAs came up for renegotiation, the administration declined to renew their authorization to sell food on campus, with exceptions for operations like the Arts Undergraduate Society’s SNAX and the Engineering Undergraduate Society’s Frostbite.

However, the Architecture Students Association, which opened a food outlet in the Macdonald-Harrington Building in 1993, never negotiated an MoA with McGill. As other campus eateries shut down, the Architecture Café continued to operate beneath the radar. (It did not pay taxes, for example.)

After the administration attempted to close the café in 2007, the eatery reopened under the partial control of Ancillary Food Services, which operated food services on campus at that time. Over the next three years, the administration reorganized food services on campus, combining the administration of operations in residences with those on campus. The decision to close the Architecture Café, Mendelson said in an interview, was just one part of the process.

“The Architecture Café,” he said, “as important as it was to many people, was, in terms of the whole scheme of operations, something that we dealt with against a backdrop of massive changes in the organization of food services on campus.”

When returning students found the café closed in September, Mendelson said he was nonplussed by the force of their response, which included two large student protests outside senate meetings.

“I was a bit surprised by the feeling outside the School of Architecture for the Architecture Cafe,” he said. “The space had always, at least notionally, been the Architecture students’ space.”

Though it has steadfastly refused to reconsider the Architecture Café’s closure, last month, the administration announced the creation of a new consultative body, called the Student Consultation and Communication Work Group. The body, composed of administrators and reprentatives from SSMU, the Post-Graduate Students’ Society, the Macdonald Campus Students’ Society, and the McGill Association of Continuing Education Students, is designed to increase student input in administrative decisions.

Newburgh has high hopes for the new group.

“We are institutionalizing a process of student consultation that this university has never seen before,” he said.

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