In the history of any country there are some famous family names to conjure with - or, rather, with which to conjure. Take Eaton, Gooderham, Grant, Ketchum, Massey, Trudeau and add any others. One that has reappeared recently after not having been heard very often for half a century is the name Osler.

The William Osler Health Centre has revived it. Since 1998 it has been a regional referral agency for amalgamated medical and surgical services in Etobicoke and Peel regions. Its 'catchment area' is 2,400 nearby square kilometres in which one million people live. It employs 700 health care professionals, 3,700 other staff people and enlists the help of over 1,000 volunteers. It 'partners' with other institutions from Sunnybrook- Women`s College Hospital and Sick Kids in Toronto to Headwaters in Orangeville / Shelburne and with other agencies for specialised care.

Sir William Osler (1849-1919) was in his time Canada`s most famous physician and medical educator. His Principles and Practice of Medicine and teaching appointments here and abroad made him by 1890 one of the best known medical men in the world. Most notably, in 1905 he became Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford and was knighted by King George V in 1911.

After a professional lifetime revolutionising both undergraduate and graduate schools for training those who minister to the sick, he died of pneumonia . His remains were cremated and the ashes now rest in McGill University's Osler Library together with his books and papers.

He was born at Bond Head, Ontario, the seventh child of the Reverend Featherstone Osler, rector of Trinity Church there and his wife Ellen Pickton Osler. His father had been since the late 1830s the pioneer 'saddlebag' Anglican priest in North York, Tecumseth and Mono, which areas were being opened to settlers. His journals record his optimism about the future of the region and imagine its bucolic beauty once the swamps and woodlands had given place to rolling hills and farms.

Before ordination in England he had been a lieutenant in the Royal Navy and had served in H.M.S.Victory, once Lord Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar. It now lies in dry dock at Portsmouth, England. Because his father was dying in 1831 he was excused from sailing to the Pacific in H.M.S.Beagle and thus missed a five-year association with Charles Darwin. He did, however, visit various ports in South America.

Featherstone Osler had answered an appeal from the Upper Canada Clergy Society to work in the hinterlands of what would become southern Ontario. His Cambridge University associates thought of his coming here as "absolute banishment".. His February, 1839 arrival in Mono Township was in the coldest time of year and over what he described as "wretched roads". Among the scattered homesteads he was welcomed first by the Ketchum and McManus families in whose log cabins he conducted services. "It grieved me to witness the destitution" of the pioneering families, he noted in his journals that are now in the library of Trinity College, Toronto.

Featherstone and Ellen Osler had 11 children at least three of whom made the family name famous in Canada and internationally. In 1880 Featherstone Jr. declined appointment to the Supreme Court because he was not fluent in French. Britton ('B.B.') Osler was Crown attorney at the 1885 treason trial of Louis Riel in Calgary. After appeals based on the matter of his sanity Riel was hanged by order of the federal cabinet. The Conservative Party thus lost its previously solid support in Quebec and has never regained it.

Five years later, in 1890, Mr Justice Britton Bath Osler acted for the Crown in the sensational Birchall murder trial in Woodstock, Ontario. The case was reported in newspapers worldwide and is outlined in Memories of a Great Detective, the story of the career of John Wilson Murray who tracked down "Reginald Birchall: occupation, murderer".

Birchall, a Briton, planned to lure several well-to-do young Englishmen into partnership with him in an Ontario land venture. He would collect a sizeable initial amount of money, accompany them to Canada via New York and Niagara Falls and then murder them. He disposed of his first victim, Fred Benwell, in a swampy area of Oxford County, Ontario. Douglas Pelly, the next one slated to be murdered, escaped being pushed into the Niagara whirlpool. The 1990 publicity in the British press may have given Sir Arthur Conan Doyle the idea he needed for the 1891 death of Professor Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes's own planned demise at Switzerland's Alpine Reichenbach Falls. The subsequent return of Holmes by public demand was explained as a three-year disappearing act in order to escape vengeance from Moriarty's colleagues.

Another son of Featherstone and Ellen, Edmund Osler, became president of the Dominion Bank, the 1869-1955 precursor, with the Bank of Toronto (1854-1955)

of the present TD/Canada Trust. He was also a director of the Canadian Pacific Railway and a business associate of Sir Henry Pellatt of Casa Loma.

After serving at the Montreal General Hospital Dr William Osler spent some years in Philadelphia and in Baltimore where at age 41 he married a great granddaughter of Paul Revere who figures prominently in legends of the American Colonial Revolution. Their son, Revere, served during the First Great War in the Royal Artillery and died of shrapnel wounds in Belgium at age 21, August 1917.

What would Paul Revere, someone asked, have thought if he could have seen his great-great grandson serving with the Royal Artillery and being buried wrapped in the Union Jack? The fact is that the name Osler is one of those that links the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada in a historic, if not a political, unity.

Sir William had been knighted in 1911. It is said that the great doctor continued to have fits of weeping for his son until his own death in England during the postwar influenza epidemic of 1919. He was 70. The real cause of death, said his medical colleagues, was a broken heart. Lady Grace Osler, his wife, lived another nine years. Her ashes rest with his at the Osler Library in Montreal.