The podictionary word for today is “adrenaline”: The New York Times quotes Dianna Krall as saying she likes high adrenaline. Elsewhere it says a new movie out on DVD is full of adrenaline. When I look at even the most recent dictionaries I am told that adrenaline is a synonym for epinephrine [ep-in-eph-rin].

Of course the DVD contains no liquid; the meanings here are synonyms for excitement because as I’m sure you know, when we get excited, the thing that makes our hearts beat faster is this hormone epinephrine or adrenaline that’s released into our bloodstream by the appropriately named gland, the adrenal gland. So clearly adrenaline takes its name from the gland that produces it, and now we use adrenaline as a word to mean what we feel when adrenaline is pumping through our veins, although the dictionaries haven’t quite caught up to that yet. I looked on wordspy.com and found a citation for “adrenaline TV” dating to 1995, but I can’t seem to find when people started using the word for the hormone to mean the physical effects or the feeling. The word itself is only just over 100 years old since the existence of the hormone wasn’t discovered until the late 1800s.

As I said, adrenaline takes its name from the adrenal gland and the adrenal gland in turn takes its name from where it’s located, on top of the kidneys, since in Latin “renal” means kidney. The reason I chose today’s word is because one of the citations in the OED, not the first citation, is co-authored by a guy named William Osler. Now I personally hadn’t heard of William Osler but as soon as I looked him up I saw that around the time when adrenaline was getting discovered, he was one of the most respected medical men in the western world.

He graduated from McGill university, which is my alma mater, and also the place where Professor Dennis Osmond taught anatomy, Professor Osmond having helped me out immeasurably by pointing out places where I could improve the accuracy of my book. But back to William Osler. After he left McGill he managed to land a job as the first chief of staff at Johns Hopkins Hospital, then became one of the first professors of medicine at Johns Hopkins University; was later appointed to the Regius Chair of Medicine at Oxford and later made a baronet. I suppose one could look on William Osler and lament how inconsequential one’s own life is; but I’d like to offer a more hopeful viewpoint.

Especially hopeful if you have any kids that you find constantly getting into trouble. When William Osler was wee Willie Osler he was kicked out of school for filling the one room schoolhouse with chickens overnight. He was kicked out of another school for removing all the furniture and stuffing it into the attic. He was kicked out of another school for boarding up the chimney and gleefully watching as the fire trucks arrived.

As he neared the end of his high school years he and a group of other boys were taken to court for locking the school caretaker and her daughter in their apartment over the classrooms. Evidently the action had been so heated leading up to this incarceration that the caretaker had emptied a chamberpot down the stairs onto the troublemakers. However, buy this time people were beginning to see some sort of hope in the life of William because in his final year he and several of his co-defendants were made prefects in the same school.

Even later as a respected physician and academic William Osler remained a trickster; adopting a pseudonym and submitting fictitious articles to the best medical journals. The most celebrated of these claimed case histories of a condition he called penis captivus whereby during lovemaking a woman’s vagina involuntarily clamps down on a man’s penis and the couple are stuck together and can’t get apart. This bogus condition fooled the screening board at the Philadelphia Medical News. I’d say old William Osler had more than his own share of adrenaline.