Brief Introduction: Oliver Wendell Holmes (1911) by John Torrey Morse

From 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, Volume 13

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES (1809-1894), American writer and physician, was born on the 29th of August 1809 at Cambridge, Mass. His father, Abiel Holmes (1763-1837), was a Calvinist clergyman, the writer of a useful history,Annals of America, and of much very dull poetry. His mother (the second wife of Abiel) was Sarah Wendell, of a distinguished New York family. Through her Dr Holmes was descended from Governors Thomas Dudley and Simon Bradstreet of Massachusetts, and from her he derived his cheerfulness and vivacity, his sympathetic humour and wit. From Phillips (Andover) Academy he entered Harvard in the “famous class of ’29,” made further illustrious by the charming lyrics which he wrote for the anniversary dinners from 1851 to 1889, closing with the touching “After the Curfew.” After graduation he studied law perfunctorily for a year and dabbled in literature, winning the public ear by a spirited lyric called forth by the order to destroy the old frigateConstitution. These verses were sung all over the land, and induced the Navy Department to revoke its order and save the old ship. Turning next to medicine, and convinced by a brief experience in Boston that he liked it, he went to Paris in March 1833. He studied industriously under Louis and other famous physicians and surgeons in France, and in his vacations visited the Low Countries, England, Scotland and Italy. Returning to Boston at the close of 1835, filled with a high professional ambition, he sought practice, but achieved only moderate success. Social, brilliant in conversation, and a writer of gay little poems, he seemed to the grave Bostonians not sufficiently serious. He won prizes, however, for professional papers, and lectured on anatomy at Dartmouth College. He wrote two papers on homoeopathy, which he attacked with trenchant wit; also a valuable paper on the malarial fevers of New England. In 1843 he published his essay on theContagiousness of PuerperalFever, which stirred up a fierce controversy and brought upon him bitter personal abuse; but he maintained his position with dignity, temper and judgment; and in time he was honoured as the discoverer of a beneficent truth. The volume of his medical essays holds some of his most sparkling wit, his shrewdest observation, his kindliest humanity. In 1840 he married Amelia Lee Jackson, daughter of the Hon. Charles Jackson (1775–1855), formerly associate justice of the State supreme judicial court, a lady of rare charm alike of mind and character. She died in the winter of 1887–1888. Their first-born child, Oliver Wendell Holmes, afterwards became chief justice of that same bench on which his grandfather sat. In 1847 Dr Holmes was appointed professor of anatomy and physiology in the Medical School of Harvard University, the duties involving the giving of instruction also in kindred departments, so that, as he said, he occupied “not a chair, but a settee in the school.” He delivered the anatomical lectures until November 1882, and in later years these were his only link with the medical profession. They were fresh, witty and lively; and the students were sent to him at the end of the day, when they were fagged, because he alone could keep them awake. In later years he made few finished contributions to medical knowledge; his eager and impetuous temperament caused him to leave more patient investigators to push to ultimate results the suggestions thrown out by his fertile and imaginative mind.

In 1836, being in that year the Phi Beta Kappa poet at Harvard University, he published his first volume ofPoems, which afterwards reached a second edition. Among these earlier lyrics was “The Last Leaf,” one of the most delicate combinations of pathos and humour in literature. His collected poetry fills three volumes. In 1856–1857 a Boston publishing house (Phillips, Sampson, and Co.) invited James Russell Lowell to edit a new magazine, which he agreed to do on condition that he could secure the assistance of Dr Holmes. By this urgent invitation the Doctor was equally surprised and flattered, for heretofore he had stood rather outside the literary coterie of Cambridge and Boston. He accepted with pleasure, and at once threw himself into the enterprise with zeal. He christened itThe Atlantic Monthly; and, as Mr Howells afterwards said, he “not only named but made” it, for in each number of its first volume there appeared one of the papers of theAutocrat of the Breakfast Table. The opening of theAutocrat— “I was just going to say when I was interrupted” — is explained by the fact that in the oldNew England Magazine (1831 to 1833) the Doctor had published twoAutocrat papers, which, by his wish, have never been reprinted. In the commercial panic of 1857 the new magazine would inevitably have failed had