SIR WILLIAM OSLER, one of Hopkins’ four founding doctors, served as physician-in-chief and professor of medicine. He was a proponent of the close integration of the hospital with the instruction of students in the School of Medicine–a model emphasizing teaching at the bedside that he pioneered at Johns Hopkins. Through lectures and his landmark textbook, first issued in 1892, Principles and Practice of Medicine, he had a tremendous influence on both clinical practice and medical education in America. During the 14 years he spent at Hopkins, Dr. Osler revolutionized the medical curriculum of the United States and Canada, ushering in the era of scientific medicine and creating policies and programs that have endured. Dr. Osler was a skilled diagnostician, a generalist who believed physicians should be knowledgeable in a broad range of specialties. He did seminal work in hematology. He also published amusing and inspiring essays and speeches, still popular among physicians. Perhaps his most lasting legacy was his vision of how a physician ought to be: skillful and competent, yet approachable and compassionate.
William Osler Professorship in Medicine
School of Medicine
Department of Medicine
Established in 1978 by the estate of J. Earl Moore in memory of William Osler
Held by Nadia Hansel
NADIA HANSEL, MD, MPH, William Osler Professor of Medicine, is the director of the Department of Medicine (DOM) in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, physician-in-chief of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, and director of medicine for Johns Hopkins Medicine. A 1997 graduate from Harvard Medical School, Dr. Hansel completed her internal medical residency at the University of Pennsylvania before joining Johns Hopkins to complete a master’s in public health at Johns Hopkins University in 2001. Simultaneously, she began a fellowship in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine that she completed in 2004 before joining the faculty at Hopkins. In 2014, she was named associate dean of research at Johns Hopkins Bayview and chair of the Bayview Scientific Advisory Board.
Dr. Hansel directed the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine from 2019 until she became interim departmental director in 2022. During that time, she was elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) and received an Annual Sponsorship Award from the DOM Task Force on Women’s Academic Careers in Medicine. She also leads the Development Core of the Collaborative Centers in Children’s Environmental Health Research and Translation funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Dr. Hansel’s areas of clinical expertise include chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and asthma. Her research focuses on understanding environmental determinants and sub-phenotypes of obstructive airway diseases.