Oliver Wendell Holmes

Oliver Wendell Holmes: The Doctor Who Named Things

On 13 February 1843 a thirty-three-year-old Boston physician with no obstetric practice stood before the Boston Society for Medical Improvement and told the room that respectable doctors were carrying death from the dissecting table into the lying-in chamber on their own unwashed hands. He had spent a year reading case reports to build the argument. Nobody had a germ theory to hang it on, and the profession's reply was that he was a sophomoric writer meddling in a specialty he did not practise.

The Minister's Son Who Wouldn't Preach

Oliver Wendell Holmes was born on 29 August 1809 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, son of Abiel Holmes, Congregational minister and historian, and Sarah Wendell, through whom he descended from the poet Anne Bradstreet. His father sent him at fifteen to Phillips Academy hoping the ministry would take; Holmes found the place "bigoted, narrow-minded, uncivilized" and went to Harvard instead, graduating in 1829 — a small man, five feet three inches in substantial boots, who talked his way into the Hasty Pudding and Phi Beta Kappa. Law came next and failed fast. By January 1830 he was writing that he was "sick at heart of this place and almost everything connected to it."

He filled the wasted year with more than fifty poems. One, prompted by a newspaper item announcing that the frigate USS *Constitution* was to be broken up, ran in the *Boston Daily Advertiser* in September 1830 and was reprinted from New York to Washington. "Old Ironsides" made him famous at twenty-one and helped save the ship. "The Last Leaf," written the same year about a survivor of the Boston Tea Party, Poe called one of the finest works in the English language; Lincoln, his law partner recalled, would "recite it, praise it, laud it, and swear by it."

Paris, and the Anatomy Room

Holmes chose medicine anyway. He studied in Boston under James Jackson, then in 1833 went to the École de Médecine in Paris to work at La Pitié under Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis, who taught the clinical method and the *méthode expectante* — the radical proposition that a physician should observe, count cases, and let nature do most of the healing. Holmes came home a statistician of disease to a country still bleeding and blistering its patients. He took a Harvard medical degree in 1836, taught anatomy at Dartmouth from 1838, and in 1847 became Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Harvard, dean until 1853, lecturing until his final class on 28 November 1882. Students called him Uncle Oliver.

He shredded homeopathy in 1842 as "a mingled mass of perverse ingenuity, of tinsel erudition, of imbecile credulity, and of artful misrepresentation," and remarked that if the whole materia medica went into the sea it would be better for mankind and worse for the fishes.

A Private Pestilence

"The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever" appeared in the *New England Quarterly Journal of Medicine and Surgery* in April 1843. Holmes had assembled cases in which women died after being attended by physicians fresh from autopsies — one had carried pelvic organs in his pocket to the classroom before going to a delivery — and connected the fever to erysipelas. He set out eight preventive rules: avoid post-mortems, and if you must attend one, clean yourself and wait a day; a physician with repeated cases should stop practising midwifery.

The reception was hostile or silent. Charles D. Meigs called him a sophomore; Hugh Hodge denied the contagion outright; colleagues objected that Holmes was not an obstetrician. The journal folded soon after. He reissued the essay in 1855 as *Puerperal Fever as a Private Pestilence*, with more cases and a sentence that is the plainest thing he ever wrote: "I had rather rescue one mother from being poisoned by her attendant, than claim to have saved forty out of fifty patients to whom I had carried the disease." Ignaz Semmelweis reached the same conclusion in Vienna around 1847 and added chlorine handwashing; London's Queen Charlotte's Lying-in Hospital adopted Holmes's rules by 1852.

Naming Things

He had a peculiar gift for the word that sticks. When W. T. G. Morton demonstrated ether in 1846, it was Holmes who wrote to him proposing that the state be called "Anaesthesia," signifying insensibility. He coined "Boston Brahmin" for the city's old families, and pronounced Boston the hub of the solar system, "the thinking centre of the continent, and therefore of the planet."

The Autocrat at the Table

He also named *The Atlantic Monthly*, and made it. For its first issue he revived a device from his student days: a fictional breakfast-table monologue, argumentative, digressive, studded with verse and jokes. *The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table* sold ten thousand copies in three days when collected in 1858 and remains his most durable work; he extended it with *The Professor at the Breakfast-Table* (1860), *The Poet at the Breakfast-Table* (1872) and *Over the Teacups* (1891). Three "medicated novels" followed — *Elsie Venner* (1861), *The Guardian Angel* (1867) and *A Mortal Antipathy* — the first of which, questioning original sin by making its heroine's character an accident of prenatal snakebite, was denounced as heretical.

The Blind Spots

As dean in 1850 Holmes admitted Martin Delany and two other Black students to Harvard Medical School. Sixty students signed a protest, forty-eight signed a counter-resolution, and Holmes told the Black students they could not continue past the semester; the faculty had him record that "the intermixing of races is distasteful to a large portion of the class." He wrote of Native Americans as "a sketch in red crayon of a rudimental manhood" and saw only extermination ahead. He scolded abolitionists for inflammatory language, then hardened into an ardent Unionist after 1861, writing on 4 July 1863 that it was idle to look for any cause of the war other than slavery. His son was wounded three times in that war; Holmes searched Maryland for him after Antietam and published the account in his own magazine.

Why Oliver Is Called a Genius

The word was used of him in his lifetime, and it meant something specific: conversational and associative speed. Henry James Sr. called him "intellectually the most alive man I ever knew"; the critic John G. Palfrey wrote of a "man of genius" whose "manner is entirely his own, manly and unaffected." The faculty was an ability to move between registers — anatomy, verse, satire, epidemiology — and to see that a pattern in one domain was the same pattern in another. The puerperal fever essay is the proof case: not laboratory discovery but inference, a literary man's reading of scattered case reports until a transmission chain emerges, held against ridicule and without the germ theory that would later vindicate it.

The counter-case is real. Holmes discovered no organism and ran no experiment; his contribution was synthesis and nerve. As a writer he has not survived. Hyatt Waggoner noted that of his mountain of occasional verse "very little survives the occasions that produced it"; S. I. Hayakawa and Howard Mumford Jones judged him "distinctly an amateur in letters." The psychiatrist Clarence Oberndorf found the novels poor fiction by modern criteria, and of the fireside poets Holmes is now the least likely to appear in an anthology. A mind that quick still could not think past the racial assumptions of its class.

Legacy

Holmes outlived nearly everyone he had talked to — Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Hawthorne — and said he felt like his own survivor. He died on 7 October 1894; his son reported that he simply ceased to breathe. The tablet at King's Chapel lists his achievements in the order he would have chosen — teacher of anatomy, essayist, poet — and closes with Horace: *miscuit utile dulci*. The useful part saved women's lives before anyone could explain why it worked.

Achievements

• Notable work: The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table
• Notable work: Ode for Washington’s Birthday
• Notable work: Angel of Peace
• Notable work: A Ballad of the Boston Tea Party
• Affiliated with Harvard University
• Educated at Harvard Medical School, Phillips Academy and Harvard College
• Worked as physician, poet and physician writer