Holmes, Oliver Wendell (1809-1894)

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Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)

Author, physician

Popularity. According to one of his students, when Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes entered his classroom at Harvard College to lecture on anatomy, he was greeted “by a mighty shout and stamp of applause. Then silence, and there begins a charming hour of description, analysis, simile, anecdote [and] harmless pun, which clothes the dry bones with poetic imagery…” Holmes’s fame, however, went far beyond his medical lectures, for he also gained renown as a poet, novelist, biographer, and essayist. Indeed for more than half a century Holmes was a dominating force in the intellectual life of New England. His novels were much admired for their wit and humor, shrewd observations, originality of prose, and inventiveness of created characters. Furthermore, his writings exhibited an independent intellectual attitude, aversion to any restraint on free thought, and a scientific habit of mind.

Doctor. Oliver Wendell Holmes was born on 29 August 1809 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father, the Rev. Abiel Holmes was a Congregationalist minister. The young Holmes received his initial education at Phillips Academy. Between 1833 and 1835 he studied medicine in Paris. When he returned to America, he quickly wrote an essay on heart inflammation in order to fulfill a requirement for the Harvard Medical School and received the M.D. degree in February 1836. Over the course of the next two years Holmes won three Boylston prizes—an unprecedented feat—for medical essays on various topics. This achievement undoubtedly helped Holmes earn a professorship at Dartmouth Medical College in 1839. On 15 June 1840 he married Amelia Jackson and then settled in Boston to practice medicine. Holmes gained further recognition by publishing a landmark study on puerperal, or childbirth, fever. In 1847 he joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School, where he served as professor of anatomy and physiology for the next thirty-five years. (He also served a brief stint as medical school dean between 1847 and 1853).

Literary Interests. The work of being a physician did not detract from Holmes’s interests in the literary arts. He was an intimate friend with some of the leading New England writers of his day—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Russell Lowell, and John Greenleaf Whittier. In this circle of writers Holmes quickly became recognized as a brilliant conversationalist and poet. When Lowell became the editor of a new literary magazine in Boston, it was inevitable that Holmes was asked to submit contributions. Holmes suggested the name for the publication, The Atlantic Monthly, and its first issue in November 1857 had the opening installment of Holmes’s “The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table,” a series of essays detailing the daily conversations of residents at a Boston boardinghouse. (In 1858 the twelve essays would appear in book form.) The essays included some of Holmes’s best poems and reflected the author’s ideas on the limitations of the human will, art, youth and age, and love. Holmes capitalized on his success with the publication of The Professor at the Breakfast-Table (1860), a book that followed the same conversational pattern but which dealt with the conflict between religion and science. In 1861 Holmes wrote his first major novel, Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny, in which he treats the life of a young girl as an allegory of original sin and moral responsibility.

Later Years. In 1872 Holmes published The Poet at the Breakfast-Table, bringing to a close his trilogy. He retired from Harvard Medical School in 1882 in order to devote more time to his active literary career. Four years later he toured England and wrote a book recounting his travels. In 1891 the Boston publishing house Houghton, Mifflin produced a thirteenvolume edition of The Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, a tribute to more than sixty years of observations on life, science, art, and philosophy. Among his other writings were The Guardian Angel (1867), Pages from an Old Volume of Life (1883), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1885), and Over the Teacups (1891). Holmes died at his home in Boston on 10 October 1894. He was the father of the eminent U.S. Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.