Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. c. 1894
Born:	August 29 1809(1809-08-29) Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
Died:	October 7 1894 (aged 85) Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
Occupation(s):	Author, Professor of Anatomy and Physiology

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., (August 29, 1809 – October 7,1894) was a physician by profession but achieved fame as a writer; he was one of the best regarded American poets of the 19th century.

Life and career

He was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts, the son of Abiel Holmes (1763-1837), a Calvinist clergyman, avid historian, author of Annals of America (a critically praised work for which he was granted an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh) and of unnotable poetry, and his 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. In 1840, Holmes married Amelia Lee Jackson, 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 great American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

He was educated at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and at Harvard College. 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, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. became one of leading proponents of the méthode expectante in America.. Holmes' M.D. was ultimately granted from Harvard, where he would later become Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology. He also served on the faculty of Dartmouth Medical School from 1838 to 1840.

He first attained national prominence with his poem Old Ironsides about the 18th century frigate USS Constitution, which was to be broken up for scrap; the poem generated public sentiment that resulted in the historic ship being preserved as a monument. One of his most popular works was The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. He was one of the five members of the group known as the Fireside Poets. He contributed poems and essays to the Atlantic Monthly from its inception, and also published novels. Holmes is also known for his writing of several beautiful hymns which are found by following this link: http://www.cyberhymnal.org/bio/h/o/l/holmes_ow.htm

In 1843, Holmes published The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever and controversially concluded that puerperal fever was frequently carried from patient to patient by physicians and nurses. Holmes, along with Ignaz Semmelweis in 1846, were the first to publish recommendations that healthcare workers wash their hands. Although his recommendations had little impact on health practices at the time, as a result of the seminal studies by Semmelweis and Holmes, handwashing gradually became accepted as one of the most important measures for preventing transmission of pathogens in health-care facilities. Holmes was also a vocal critic of homeopathy. He published an essay Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions in which he denounced the practice.

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. 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. For many years, Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman was his private secretary.

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."

Holmes died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1894, and is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery.

A Young Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

The school library of Phillips Academy in Andover, MA is Oliver Wendell Holmes Library, or the OWHL.

Quotations

• "A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide."
• "Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions." (O.W. Holmes, Sr. 1858)
• "Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable."
• "Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used till they are seasoned."
• "if the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be so much the better for mankind – and all the worse for the fishes"
• "...the white man hates him [the Indian], and hunts him down like the wild beasts of the forest, and so the red-crayon sketch is rubbed out, and the canvas is ready for a picture of manhood a little more like God's own image."
• "Gentlemen, damn the sphenoid bone!" (Uncertain. James Rushmore Wood was identified as long ago as 1912 as saying this.)

External links

Sources

• Works by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Project Gutenberg
• Works by Oliver Wendell Holmes at Internet Archive
• Representative Poetry Online: Oliver Wendell Holmes

Other

• 11th Edition Encyclopædia Britannica (1911)
• Quotes by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
• Oliver Wendell Holmes Library
• The Imaginative Prose of Oliver Wendell Holmes by Michael A. Weinstein
• The Transcendentalist Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. a site maintained by Jone Johnson Lewis.