Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. c. 1894 |
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| Born: | August 29, 1809 Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA |
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| Died: | October 7, 1894 Boston, Massachusetts, USA |
| 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. He was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts, the son of Abiel Holmes (1763-1837), a Calvinist clergyman, avid historian, author of Annals of America and unnotable poetry and his second wife, Sarah Wendell, from 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[1], at institutions such as La Charité and Le Pitié. Holmes was a student of Dr. Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis, who demonstrated in Researches sur les effets de la saigneé dans quelques maladies inflammatoires the ineffectiveness of bloodletting as a treatment for fevers and other disorders which had been a mainstay of medical practice since antiquity. Dr. Louis, Holmes' teacher, by his work, 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.[2]. Holmes' M.D. was ultimately granted from Harvard where he would later become Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology
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.
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.[3] 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.[4] 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.[5] For many years, Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman was his private secretary.
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.
[edit] Quotation
- "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."
- "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" [6]
- "...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." [7]
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ Waddington, Ivan. "The Role of the Hospital in the Development of Modern Medicine: A Sociological Analysis" in Sociology, 7(2), pp. 211-224.
- ^ Dowling, William C. Oliver Wendell Holmes in Paris: Medicine, Theology, and The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table University Press of New England: Hanover (2006)
- ^ The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever
- ^ CDC Guideline for Hand Hygiene in Health-Care Settings
- ^ Michael Harrison, A Study in Surmise, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, February 1971, p. 59.
- ^ John H Warner, The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Practice, Knowledge and Identity in America, 1828-1885, Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986, pages 28, 33.
- ^ Thomas F. Gossett (1963) Race: the History of an Idea in America (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press). 243.
[edit] External links
