| |
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., (August 29, 1809 – October 7, 1894) was an American physician and professor who also achieved fame as a writer. During his lifetime, he was one of the best regarded poets of the 19th century and is considered a member of the Fireside Poets.
es was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on August 29, 1809, in a home near Harvard Yard where it was said the Battle of Bunker Hill was planned.
Discussion
Ask a question about 'Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.' Start a new discussion about 'Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.' Answer questions from other users |
Recent Posts
Quotations
All of us love companionship and sympathy; some of us may love them too much. All of us are more or less imaginative in our theology.
Be polite and generous, but don't undervalue yourself. You will be useful, at any rate; you may just as well be happy, while you are about it.
Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used, till they are seasoned.
Laughter and tears are meant to turn the wheels of the same machinery of sensibility; one is wind-power, and the other water-power; that is all.
Leverage is everything,—was what I used to say;—don't begin to pry till you have got the long arm on your side.
Memory is a net; one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook; but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.
Encyclopedia
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., (August 29, 1809 – October 7, 1894) was an American physician and professor who also achieved fame as a writer. During his lifetime, he was one of the best regarded poets of the 19th century and is considered a member of the Fireside Poets.
Life and career
Early life and family
Holmes was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on August 29, 1809, in a home near Harvard Yard where it was said the Battle of Bunker Hill was planned. His father was Abiel Holmes (1763-1837), the minister of the First Congregational Church and avid historian who had authored Annals of America, a critically praised work for which he was granted an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh. His mother was Abiel Holmes's second wife, Sarah Wendell, of a prominent New York family. Through her, Dr. Holmes was descended from Massachusetts Governors Thomas Dudley and Simon Bradstreet and his wife, Dudley's daughter, Anne Bradstreet, the first published American female poet.
Education
Holmes's father sent him to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, at the age of 15, hoping his behavior would improve. Holmes later attended Harvard College. While at Harvard, he wrote humorous poetry and songs for the Hasty Pudding Club. In 1833 Holmes attended the famed École de Médecine in Paris. He pursued his medical studies in the Parisian hospital system, popularly viewed as the birthplace of modern medicine and the modern style of medical education, at institutions such as La Charité and La Pitié Salpêtrière. Holmes was a student of Dr. Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis, who demonstrated the ineffectiveness of bloodletting as a treatment for fevers and other disorders, which method had been a mainstay of medical practice since antiquity. Dr. Louis was one of the fathers of the méthode expectante, the therapeutic doctrine claiming that the physician's role was only to assist nature as it healed.
Upon his return to Boston, Holmes became one of leading proponents of the méthode expectante in America. Holmes' M.D. was ultimately granted from Harvard. He then served on the faculty of Dartmouth Medical School from 1838 to 1840.
Early career
Holmes, along with three other young doctors, established the Tremont Medical School above an apothecary shop at 35 Tremont Row in Boston in 1837. There, he lectured on pathology, taught the use of microscopes, and supervised dissections of cadavers. On June 15, 1840, Holmes married Amelia Lee Jackson at King's Chapel in Boston. She was the daughter of the Hon. Charles Jackson (1775-1855), formerly Associate Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Their son was the Civil War hero and American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. In 1847, Holmes was hired as Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Harvard Medical School, where he taught until 1882 and served as dean until 1853.
While serving as dean, Holmes admitted three young black men to the Medical School. The move was controversial, sparking a student resolution which "Resolved That we have no objection to the education and evaluation of blacks but do decidedly remonstrate against their presence in College with us." In response, Holmes told the black students they would not be able to continue after that semester. Despite his support of education for blacks, he was not an abolitionist; he believed, nonetheless, that slavery could be ended peacefully and legally.
Writing career
As a writer, he first attained national prominence with his poem "Old Ironsides" about the 18th century frigate USS Constitution. After reading the Boston Daily Advertiser, Holmes learned that the historic ship was going to be dismantled by the Navy Department. The poem he wrote generated enough public sentiment that the historic ship was preserved as a monument.
Holmes was a vocal critic of homeopathy. In 1842 he published an essay Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions in which he denounced the practice.
In 1843, Holmes published The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever which argued that puerperal fever, a deadly disease of women giving birth, was frequently carried from patient to patient by physicians and nurses. A few years later, Ignaz Semmelweis would reach similar conclusions in Vienna, where his introduction of prophylaxis (handwashing in chlorine solution before assisting at delivery) would lower the puerperal mortality rate considerably. Holmes, seeing more clearly than Semmelweis that something like microbial action must be involved—his famous essay was an uncanny anticipation of Pasteur's discovery of the germ theory of disease later in the century—was altogether more radical. A physician in whose practice even one case of puerperal fever had occurred, wrote Holmes, had a moral obligation to purify his instruments, burn the clothing he had worn while assisting in the fatal delivery, and cease obstetric practice for a period of at least six months.
Holmes's essay had a major impact. Though it largely escaped notice when published as an article in a Boston medical journal, it commanded a great deal of attention it reappeared as a book several years later, on the occasion of an attack on Holmes by two famous professors of obstetrics who denied his theory of contagion. Republished with a new and powerfully written introduction by Holmes, "The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever" then became a center of controversy on both sides of the Atlantic. By the 1860s, as Holmes himself would remark in "The Professor at the Breakfast Table," both American and British physicians had come to understand that a physican or midwife who assisted at puerperal fever case must cease obstetric practice until the threat of contagion was past. In New England, where Holmes's arguments had their earliest and most pronounced influence, the death rate from puerperal fever dropped dramatically.
In 1846, in a letter to William T. G. Morton, the dentist who was the first practitioner to publicly demonstrate the use of ether during surgery, Holmes coined the word anesthesia. Dr. Holmes developed the popular model of the stereoscope, a 19th century entertainment in which pictures were viewed in 3-D. He was widely known and admired during his life. For many years, Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman was his private secretary.
Holmes was known for his conversational style and joined many social and literary organizations, including the Saturday Club and the Atlantic Club. The latter organization was created to launch and support the Atlantic Monthly in 1857, to which Holmes provided a name and also contributed. He also published novels and several religious-themed hymns. One of his most popular works to the Atlantic was a series of essays under the heading "The Autocrat at the Breakfast-Table" in which Holmes fictionalized his breakfast table talk, incorporating poetry, stories, jokes, and song. The essays were later collected as a book, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.
Beginning in December 1859, Holmes published his novel Elsie Venner serially in the Atlantic under the title "The Professor's Story". That same month, he sent medication to the ailing writer Washington Irving after visiting him at his Sunnyside home in New York; Irving died only a few months later.
Civil War years
Holmes's son, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., enlisted in the Army to join the Fourth Battalion, against his father's wishes, in April 1861. In September of that year, Holmes published an article titled "Bread and Newspapers" in the Atlantic. In it, Holmes professed himself as an ardent Unionist. He wrote, "War has taught us, as nothing else could, what we can be and are" and inspiring even the upper class to have "courage... big enough for the uniform which hangs so loosely about their slender figures." Holmes, Jr. was injured three times in battle, including a gunshot in his chest at the Battle of Ball's Bluff in October 1861.
Later years and death
Holmes's fame continued through his later years. In June 1886, he received an honorary degree from Yale University Law School.
There is a frequently repeated story about Dr. Holmes, but not always mentioning him by name. While awakening from ether induced unconsciousness, he strongly believed he had discovered the key to all the mysteries of the universe. He wrote down the secret, but when his head had cleared he found he'd written "A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout."
Amelia, Holmes's wife, had struggled with illness for months before dying on February 6, 1888.
Holmes died quietly after falling asleep in the afternoon of Sunday, October 7, 1894. His memorial service was held at King's Chapel and overseen by Edward Everett Hale. Holmes was buried alongside his wife in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Writing
Holmes gained international fame with his "Breakfast-Tables" series. He is part of the group known as the Fireside Poets alongside William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and John Greenleaf Whittier. These poets were among the first Americans to build substantial popularity in Europe. Writing from this group was characterized as family-friendly and conventional.
Criticism and legacy
Editor and critic George Ripley was an admirer of Holmes and referred to him as "one of the wittiest and most original of modern poets". Ralph Waldo Emerson noted Holmes attempted to become a poet late in life but quickly perfected his role "like old pear trees which have done nothing for ten years, and at last begin to grow great."
Holmes created the term Boston Brahmin, referring to the oldest families in the Boston area. The school library of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts is Oliver Wendell Holmes Library, or the OWHL.
The noted Sherlockian Michael Harrison conjectured that the British author Arthur Conan Doyle drew one inspiration for his famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes from a real-life self-described "consulting detective" named Wendel Scherer changing "Scherer" to "Sherlock" and "Wendel" to "Holmes" by association with Oliver Wendell Holmes.
External links
Sources
Other
- by Michael A. Weinstein
- a site maintained by Jone Johnson Lewis.
- The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay: A Logical Story - audio reading
|
