"A Vile Custom": The Strange Career of William Osler's "Professional Notes".

This article examines "Professional Notes among the Indian Tribes about Great Slave Lake, NWT," a fictional and racially charged essay written in 1882 by Canadian physician William Osler under the pseudonym Egerton Yorrick Davis (EYD). Originally intended as a prank targeting a colleague, the essay circulated widely within elite medical circles for decades, reflecting and reinforcing anti-Indigenous racism embedded in the medical profession during its professionalization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The article traces the essay’s creation, its role as an inside joke among predominantly white, male medical elites, and its enduring legacy, highlighting how humor functioned both to build professional identity and to exclude and demean Indigenous peoples and other marginalized groups. It also situates the hoax within the broader colonial and scientific racist contexts of the time, emphasizing the need to critically assess informal medical cultures alongside formal institutional histories of racism.