Statistics are not always practicable, but consider these: If the average reader can read 300 words a minute of average reading, then in 15 minutes he can read 4,500 words. Multiplied by 7, the days of the week, the product is 31,500. Another multiplication by 4, the weeks of the month, makes 126,000. And final multiplication by 12, the months of the total number of words of average reading an average reader can do in just 15 minutes a day for one year.
Books vary in length from 60,000 to 100,000 words. The average is about 75,000 words. In one year of average reading by an average reader for 15 minutes a day, 20 books will be read. That’s a lot of books. It is 4 times the number of books read by public-library borrowers in America. And yet it is easily possible.
One of the greatest of all modern physicians was Sir William Osler. He taught at the Johns Hopkins Medical School. He finished his teaching days at McGil University. Many of the outstanding physicians2 today were his students. Nearly all of the practicing doctors of today were brought up on his medical textbooks. Among his many remarkable contributions to medicine are his unpublished notes on how people die.
His greatness is attributed by his biographers and critics3 not alone to his profound medical knowledge and insight but to his broad general education, for he was a very cultured man. He was interested in what men have done and thought throughout the ages. And he knew that the only way to find out what the best experiences of the race had been was to read what people had written. But Osler’s problem was the same as everyone else’s, only more so.