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| Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. | |
|---|---|
 Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. c. 1894 | |
| Born | August 29 1809 Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.
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| Died | October 7 1894 (aged 85) Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
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| Occupation | 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.
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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 American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
A young Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
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 educationWaddington, Ivan. "The Role of the Hospital in the Development of Modern Medicine: A Sociological Analysis" in Sociology, 7(2), pp. 211-224., 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.Louis\' findings on the subject were published as Recherches sur les effets de la saignée dans quelques maladies inflammatoires (Research on the effects of bloodletting on several inflammatory disorders). 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.Dowling, William C. Oliver Wendell Holmes in Paris: Medicine, Theology, and The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table University Press of New England: Hanover (2006). 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.Blough, Barbara; Dana Cook Grossman. Two Hundred Years of Medicine at Dartmouth. Dartmouth Medical School. Retrieved on 2007-12-21.
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 which argued that puerperal fever, a deadly disease of women giving birth, was frequently carried from patient to patient by physicians and nurses.The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever 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. 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.Michael Harrison, A Study in Surmise, Ellery Queen\'s Mystery Magazine, February 1971, p. 59. 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."Laybourn, G. P. Jr., It\'s Turpentine, Time Magazine, Oct. 04, 1948 (Letters)The Consolations of Philosophy, Time Magazine, Aug. 30, 1948 Holmes, Oliver Wendell Mechanism in Thought and Morals, Sampson Low, Son, and Marston: London (1871) p. 55.
Grave of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Holmes died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1894, and is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery.
The school library of Phillips Academy in Andover, MA is Oliver Wendell Holmes Library, or the OWHL.
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| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr. |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | Poet, essayist, physician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 29 1809 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Cambridge, Massachusetts |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 7 1894 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | Cambridge, Massachusetts |
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