Sir William Osler, eugenics, racism, and the Komagata Maru incident

Abstract

A recent critic levels two new charges against Sir William Osler: (1) that in 1912 he was a vice president of the First International Eugenics Congress; and (2) that in 1914 he asserted Canada should remain a “a white man’s country.” Osler was indeed among the 31 vice presidents of the First International Eugenics Congress, but he did nothing further in this area. Osler indeed asserted that Canada should remain a “white man’s country,” but his context was the Komagata Maru incident during which most Canadians felt the same way about 376 passengers from the Punjab Province of British India who sought to defy Canadian immigration law. There is little or no indication of racism elsewhere in Osler’s deeds and writings, and the idea that race is largely a social construct emerged only after his death. Advocates for racial equality should view Osler not as an adversary but rather as an ally in today’s battles for global justice and also for human survival.

Sir William Osler (1849–1919), the most iconic figure in the history of North American medicine, will predictably incur new criticisms through the lens of “presentism” (judging the past from a present-day perspective) during the second century after his death.¹ Anticipating such criticisms, the 138 contributors to a recently published encyclopedia pertaining to Osler compiled more than 30 actual or potential criticisms from a 21st-century perspective.² Eugenics and racism were not among them. A recent contributor to the Montreal Gazette challenges Osler’s place in history, citing among other things two observations that have heretofore drawn little notice: (1) that in 1912 Osler was a vice president of the first international congress on eugenics; and (2) that in 1914 Osler said, “We are bound to make our country [Canada] a white man’s country.”³ The purpose of this article is to provide context for these observations and to review their implications for Osler’s continuing importance.

EUGENICS

Osler was indeed among the 31 vice presidents of the First International Eugenics Congress held July 24–30, 1912, at the University of London, but the list of vice presidents reads like a who’s who of British politics, international medicine, science, and higher education at a time when eugenics was popular among the intellectually and socially elite. Osler probably heard the presidential address by Leonard Darwin (1850–1943), who cautioned that “we must not blind ourselves to the danger of interfering with nature’s ways,” and he possibly heard the paper on “Rassenhygiene und Ärztliche Geburtshilfe” (“Racial Hygiene and Medical Obstetrics”) by the Berlin physician Agnes Bluhm (1862–1943), a harbinger of the ugly turn eugenics soon took in Germany and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere.⁴

Perusal of the 724 pages of congress proceedings, and of commentaries on the congress, reveals no further mention of Osler other than his being the delegate from the American Philosophical Society (to which Osler did not belong).^4–7 Biographies of Osler make no mention of eugenics, nor do his publications and unpublished correspondence. His name does not appear in standard histories of the eugenics movement. A MEDLINE search of “Osler” and “eugenics” revealed no cross-references. An Internet search turned up only his suggestion, in notes for an article for Ladies Home Journal that he never finished, that women’s participation in public life and higher education might result in lower birth rates.⁸ In conclusion, Osler had little or no interest in eugenics, and his listing as a vice president of the First International Eugenics Congress was purely titular.

THE KOMAGATA MARU INCIDENT

Osler indeed stated on May 28, 1914, that Canada should remain “a white man’s country,” but the context was an event known to historians as the Komagata Maru incident.⁹ Five days earlier, on May 23, a Japanese steamship, the Komagata Maru, anchored in Vancouver harbor with 376 passengers from the Punjab Province of British India seeking to immigrate. Gurdit Singh (1860–1954), a Punjabi-born businessman, organized the voyage partly to challenge Canadian immigration laws. Officials allowed 21 passengers who had previously been in Canada to disembark but made the others wait on board while attorneys argued the case (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Passengers on the crowded deck of the Komagata Maru. Image courtesy of Matteo Omied/Alamy Stock Photo.

Osler’s remark came at a dinner held at the Canada Club in London to honor Prince Alexander of Teck (1874–1957; later, Alexander Cambridge, First Earl of Athlone), who had been nominated to serve as governor general of Canada. The guests were abuzz with news of the Komagata Maru. They were also anxious about unrest in British India and the prospect of imminent war with Germany. They partook of lobster and champagne and endured the prince’s speech before Osler, as presiding officer, gave closing remarks. The only surviving account of what he said seems to be that of a reporter for the Montreal Gazette:

Speaking of the problems which lay before Canada, Sir William said in the first place we have made the country a white man’s country. Other countries were beginning to swarm over with population. The question with us is what we are going to do when the yellow and brown men begin to swarm over. There is no trouble so far as China and Japan are concerned—they are foreign countries [that is, not part of the British Empire].

We can say we do not want their people, but the case is different with the Indians, who are our fellow citizens [of the British Empire]. We ought, if we could, say to them, “Come on in, you are welcome.” But we have to safeguard our country. Therefore, we shall be bound to say, “We are sorry, we would if we could, but you cannot come in on equal terms with Europeans.” We are bound to make our country a white man’s country.¹⁰

Whether Osler read from a prepared text or responded to a question is not stated.

The historian Peter Ward, in White Canada Forever, summarizes British Columbian opinion on Asian immigration: “From the late 1850s to the early 1940s anti-Orientalism was endemic…. White society feared and disliked the Asian minority [in British Columbia] … and made its feelings abundantly clear in thought, word, and deed.”¹¹ White Canadians feared that population pressures in China, Japan, and, to a lesser extent, East India, would drive hordes of Asians to destinations on the Pacific rim including British Columbia, despite its cold climate. They considered Asians “unassimilable”—they could not be absorbed into the predominantly white society. There were fewer objections to East Indians than to Chinese and Japanese, but they were still unwanted.

On January 8, 1908, in the wake of a riot in Vancouver during a rally organized by the Asiatic Exclusion League, the Canadian government enacted a “continuous journey regulation” to limit immigration by East Indians. The regulation stipulated that all immigrants to Canada had to arrive by continuous (nonstop) journey on a through ticket purchased in their country of origin. The three steamship companies with service between South Asia and British Columbia stopped selling through tickets to East Indians, leaving them no direct service to Canada.

Gurdit Singh wished to overturn the continuous journey regulation. Some of the passengers on the Komagata Maru were thought to be Indian nationalists and there were rumors of weapons. The incident made headlines in Canada and beyond in an already tense British Empire.

On June 28, 1914, exactly 1 month after Osler spoke at the Canada Club, a Serb activist precipitated World War I by assassinating Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary. Prince Alexander and Osler abandoned their separate plans to go to Canada. The prince entered military service and it was not until 1940 that he became governor general of Canada. Osler never saw his native country again.

On September 27, the 255 remaining Komagata Maru passengers arrived at an Indian port only to learn they were considered dangerous. Police gunned down 18 of them during a riot. Gurdit Singh escaped, eventually surrendered, and spent 5 years in prison. He lived to see India gain independence in 1947 and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru dedicate a memorial to the Komagata Maru martyrs 5 years later.

The number of East Indians in Canada fell to 1016 by 1921 and was only 1465 by 1941; thereafter it rose to 2148 by 1951 and 6774 by 1961 before ballooning to 67,295 by 1971 and 121,445 by 1981 after Canada liberalized its immigration laws.^12,13 On May 8, 2016, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau apologized to the Komagata Maru passengers on behalf of his country. Canadians now enjoy a rich multiculturalism, making the incident little more than a bad memory.

WAS OSLER A RACIST?

Racism, racial disparities in health care, and underrepresentation of minoritized persons in the physician workforce receive much attention in the current medical literature^14–16 and have long concerned the present writer.^17,18 Occasional blots on Osler’s record on race, as seen from a 21st-century perspective, have been recently reviewed.¹⁹ These include a stray remark that “I hate Latin Americans,” the basis for which is unclear, in a letter to Henry V. Ogden^20,21; references to indigenous peoples meant to be humorous^22,23; and use of African American dialect in an unpublished short story.²⁴ In 1884 Osler gave “four choice examples of skulls of British Columbian Indians” to the German pathologist and anthropologist Rudolph Virchow (1821–1902),²⁵ but he never showed interest in scientific racism (which often involved measurements of the internal dimensions of skulls), nor is he mentioned in the standard histories of scientific racism. He did not protest racially segregated wards at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, but neither did any of the other physicians, and it was not until the 1950s that this policy was reversed. He did not protest the racially exclusive policies of organized medicine, but it was not until 2008 that the American Medical Association formally apologized for this practice.²⁶

Osler’s remark that Canada should remain “a white man’s country” (as captured by a single reporter) grates on us today but was mainstream when given. The historian Hugh Johnston, author of The Voyage of the Komagata Maru,⁹ sums up public opinion in the Canadian Encyclopedia: “The events in Vancouver illustrated the widespread assumption among white Canadians that Canada was ‘a white man’s country.’ … At the time, few Canadians had any sympathy for the people on the Komagata Maru.… In fact, very few left-wing Canadians were able to sympathize with the anti-British, anti-Imperial message that the passengers heard daily from Gurdit Singh’s young, politicized lieutenants.”²⁷

In conclusion, it is fair to say that Osler endorsed systemic racism with respect to Canadian immigration policy toward Asians and East Indians at the time of the Komagata Maru incident (assuming he was quoted correctly at the dinner at the Canada Club). He would probably have agreed with an editorialist for the Vancouver News-Advertiser: “East Indians are good men. In Canada they are in the wrong place. That is all.”²⁸ There appears to be no evidence that Osler ever stooped to interpersonal (“everyday”) racism. His record on race may seem imperfect from a 21st-century perspective, but his times were greatly different from our own (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

North American cities at the time William Osler arrived in them. Clockwise from upper left: Toronto circa 1870, Montreal circa 1872, Philadelphia circa 1884, and Baltimore, circa 1889. Images courtesy of McCord Museum, Montreal (upper left); Historic Collection/Alamy Stock Photo (upper right); The Free Library of Philadelphia (lower right); and the Maryland Historical Society (lower left).

“Racist” and “racism” are emotionally charged terms with protean meanings. In applying these terms to historical figures, we should bear in mind that most of us most of the time rely mainly on emotion to decide where we stand on divisive (“wedge”) issues. We then marshal facts to reinforce what we have already decided emotionally.²⁹ That said, let us examine briefly how some of Osler’s perspectives offer a way forward for today’s troubled world, even when viewed through the lens of presentism.

CONSTRUCTIVE PRESENTISM

Critics of presentism in the historical appraisal of past events and personalities object to its use for strongly politicized purposes. Faith Wallis reviewed Osler’s views including those pertaining to the Komagata Maru incident and concluded:

No justice is done to … Osler … by weighing [his] words on the present-day scale of political correctness…. Our century [the 20th], which has seen the Holocaust, the civil rights movement, decolonization, and massive international immigration, is understandably shocked and perplexed by some of the things [he] said. It is easy to pass judgment on the dead, whose world we will never know and who cannot reply to our accusations. By presuming moral superiority over the dead and discounting their experience, presentism becomes itself a kind of prejudice. If it seems harmless—mere bias, perhaps, but hardly bigotry—it is only because its targets cannot respond.³⁰

Osler himself wrote that “a man must be judged by his times and his surroundings.”³¹

Apologists for presentism point out that, like Archimedes with his lever, we must have a place to stand. Try as we may to imagine what the past was like, to project ourselves into situations faced by our predecessors, we are ultimately mired in the present. But this does not negate the instructive value of history and biography, nor should it discourage each generation to take a fresh look at what went before. Hasok Chang of the University of Cambridge puts it well: “A critical and sympathetic engagement with the past allows us to recover the lost paths, which can also suggest new paths.”³²

We are all prisoners of the prevailing paradigms of our times, and to a greater extent than we realize. That Osler was fully capable of critical thinking—the ability to challenge assumptions and envision alternative futures—is evident in his writings, especially his travel letters. It was only during the 1920s, the decade after Osler’s death, that cultural anthropologists seriously challenged the physical anthropologists with the idea that race is a social construct, not a physical attribute. It follows that there is no reason to think that a person of one or another racial or national category is more of a drain on society or more difficult to assimilate than any other.³³

A more constructive appraisal of Osler through the lens of presentism should consider qualities and viewpoints that may apply to today’s circumstances. He decried racism and nationalism as impediments to a better world, and to this end he celebrated the “singular beneficence” of medicine.³⁴ Thus, speaking to the British Medical Association in 1897, he asserted:

Distinctions of race, nationality, colour, and creed are unknown within the portals of the temple of AEsculapius. Dare we dream that this harmony and cohesion so rapidly developing in medicine, obliterating the strongest lines of division, knowing no tie of loyalty, but loyalty to truth—dare we hope, I say, that in the wider range of human affairs a similar solidarity may ultimately be reached?³⁵

In 1902, speaking to the Canadian Medical Association, he railed:

Nationalism has been the great curse of humanity. In no other shape has the Demon of Ignorance assumed more hideous proportions; to no other obsession do we yield ourselves more readily…. A vice of the blood, of the plasm rather, it runs riot in the race, and rages today as of yore despite the precepts of religion and the practice of democracy…. What I inveigh against is a cursed spirit of intolerance, conceived in distrust and bred in ignorance, that makes the mental attitude perennially antagonistic … forgetting the higher claims of human brotherhood.³⁶

In May 1919, speaking to the Classical Association of Great Britain in the wake of World War I, in what would be his last public address, he averred that “there must be a very different civilization or there will be no civilization at all.”^37,38 He foresaw that increasingly destructive weapons threatened human survival. He asked whether science “can rule without invoking ruin.” These statements, as pointed out elsewhere,³⁹ represent an early shot across the bow against the myth of human exceptionalism (the idea that we will escape the common fate of other species). We must transcend racism and nationalism if we are to survive much longer.

Advocates for racial equality, and for steps to ensure human flourishing, should view Osler as an ally, not an adversary.