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OF

CURRENT HISTORY

VOL. 4.

JULY 1-SEPTEMBER 30, 1894.

NO. 3.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, M. D., LL. D., D. C. L., poet, prose writer, and physician, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, August 29, 1809-the third son (and the third of five children) of the Rev. Abiel Holmes, D. D.; and died at his home, No. 296 Beacon street, Boston, shortly after noon on the 7th of October, 1894. He had but a few days previously returned from his cottage at Beverly Farms, where he had long been accustomed to spend his summers.

His father (born in Woodstock, Conn., 1763, died in Cambridge, Mass., 1837) was a descendant of John Holmes, an English settler in Woodstock in 1686. John's grandson, David Holmes, grandfather of the subject of this sketch, saw military service as a captain of British troops in the old French war in America, and later as a surgeon in the Revolutionary army. The Rev. Dr. Holmes, father of the subject of this sketch, was graduated at Yale in 1783, studied there for the Congregational ministry, and was for forty years (1792 to 1832) pastor of the First parish in Cambridge. He was the author of Innals of America, a work of high authority, and of other writings on early American history. His first wife was a daughter of Ezra Stiles, D. D., President of Yale College. His second wife, the mother of Oliver Wendell, was Sarah Wendell, of a family of Dutch descent who had purchased in 1735 a large area of the Indian domain in western Massachusetts, in the region of the present city of Pittsfield.

Young Oliver, after a preparatory course at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., entered Harvard at the age of sixteen, and was graduated in 1829 in a class many of whose members became eminent in later life. His class Vol. 4-32. Copyright, 1894, by Garretson, Cox & Co.

He

chose him to deliver the poem at commencement. remained a year at Harvard as a student in the law school, then followed his natural tastes and turned to the profession of medicine; and, after the customary course at the Harvard Medical School, pursued his studies for nearly three years in the hospitals and schools of Paris and other European cities. Returning home in 1836, he took his degree M. D.; and in 1838 was appointed professor of anatomy and physiology in Dartmouth College. In 1840 he resigned this post, removed to Boston, and began a large and successful general practice. In 1849 he established his summer home on the banks of the Housatonic at Pittsfield, among the hills of Berkshire-on a part of his mother's ancestral estate. A short time before his removal to Boston, he had married (in 1840) Amelia Lee Jackson, daughter of one of the judges of the Massachusetts supreme court.

Of the three children of this marriage, the eldest, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (born in Boston, March 8, 1841), studied at Harvard; entered the Union army as lieutenant of the 20th Massachusetts infantry, 1861; was wounded at Ball's Bluff, at Antietam, and at the second battle of Fredericksburg; was promoted captain on General Sedgwick's staff and on the general staff of the sixth corps; and was mustered out of the service in June, 1864. studied law, became a member of the Boston bar in 1866, a professor in the Harvard Law School, and a judge of the Massachusetts supreme court in 1882; and has published an edition of Kent's Commentaries (Boston, 1873), The Common Law (1881), besides articles in periodicals, and addresses.

He

In 1847 Dr. Holmes was appointed to succeed Dr. John C. Warren as Parkman professor of anatomy and physiology in Harvard University, whose medical department has its seat in Boston near the shore of the Charles river opposite Cambridge. After a service of thirty-five years he resigned this post in 1882, with the repute of a successful lecturer, and having gained distinction as an anatomist and for his researches in microscopy and in auscultation.

Those who availed themselves of Dr. Holmes' services as a medical practitioner greatly valued him; and during his active years, his practice is understood to have been extensive. It has been suggested that his world wide literary fame might have been expected to bring him patients in almost unmanageable throngs; but the countersuggestion has been made that the fame of an unrivalled

wit may have seemed incongruous with the gravity of demeanor which the common mind expects of those to whom it entrusts the battle for life against disease. If the Doctor recognized this crude notion as affecting his own case, it must have been added material for his humorous estimate of popular fallacies.

As a medical practitioner and instructor Dr. Holmes was from the first, and in accordance with his whole nature, an unrelenting foe to every form of pretense. He opposed heavy dosings and advocated simplicity in remedial measures. When it is remembered that his medical career began nearly sixty years ago, it will be observed that he must have been one of the pioneers in some reforms which have now gained the assent of all leaders in medical science-notably in the reform of the intemperate use of drugs. Even so late as May, 1860, his address Currents and Counter-currents in Medical Science," delivered at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Medical Society -published in 1861 in a volume with others of his addresses and essays-occasioned alarm in the minds of many prominent physicians, by its witty assault on theories then venerable in their authority, now almost utterly discarded. Some criticisms of his free and vigorous utterances called forth a silencing response from the witty reformer, who certainly could not be charged with the indiscretion of youth as he had then entered on his second half-century. An admirable reviewer said of him:

"He makes quick work of a large part of the pharmacopoeia, and would, for the sake of mankind, throw the greater part of physic to the sea, were he not, as he intimates, too tender-hearted to poison the fishes."

His published writings on medical themes began with three dissertations which gained the Boylston prize for 1836-7 (published in Boston in 1838). The list includes his edition, in conjunction with Dr. Jacob Bigelow, of Marshall Hall's Theory and Practice of Medicine (1839); Lectures on Homeopathy and its Kindred Delusions (1842); a report on medical literature, in the Transactions of the National Medical Association for 1848; a pamphlet on Puerperal Fever (1855); Currents and Counter-currents in Medical Science, with other Addresses and Essays (1861), being a collection of his minor professional writings, including an essay on "The Mechanism of Vital Actions" reprinted from the North American Review of 1857; Border-Lines in Some Provinces of Medical Science (1867); Mechanism in Thought and Morals (1871), being a meta

physical exposition of the functions of the brain, enlarged from an address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard. In Medical Essays (1883) several of the writings above noted were reissued in one volume.

The foregoing list of his works indicates his favorite lines of thought and study in his profession, and the attraction which the subtle relations between physiology and psychology had for him-of which at least two of his novels are striking illustrations. A little piece of sportive medical criticism is his paper published in the proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society for 1862, in which he reproduces a curious manuscript containing a collection of recipes written in 1643 by a physician in London for Governor Winthrop and found among the governor's papers. This old document gives occasion for most apt and entertaining comments on the medical practice of the seventeenth century.

About the time of Dr. Holmes' appointment to the chair of anatomy and physiology in Harvard, he began to be in demand as a lyceum lecturer in New England, and afterward in the middle states; and he was long a favorite on that platform where instruction is supplied under a guise of wit and humor, and current follies and fallacies are punctured with satire. Besides lectures of this popular class, Dr. Holmes delivered notable addresses of higher literary grade before societies or other selected audiences. So early as 1852 he gave in Boston a course of lectures on the English Poets of the Nineteenth Century, marked by clear discrimination, apt illustration, and keen and flashing criticism. The course was in part repeated in New York.

This brings us to speak of Dr. Holmes as a writer who has gained fame on both sides of the Atlantic by literary work in departments remote from the scientific. The versatility of his genius is marvellous. From medicine to

metaphysics, and from both these to the realm of airy fancies, now in poem and now in prose, his pen takes easy course. As a poet his rank is secure and high: so much as this may be said without undertaking to fix his rank among contemporaneous American poets. It is always difficult to assign poetic rank, since poetry itself, as the mysterious product of a process in some sense creative, disdains scientific analysis and eludes exact classification. The poet holds a place varying with his different readers, and varying also with the same reader in varying moods. The judgment may however be hazarded, that Dr. Holmes

is among the foremost American poets, and is indeed at the very head in "poems of occasions" and in one or two kindred departments. In all his verse his thought is agile and natural, and often strikingly original; his sentiment is pure; his wit sparkles like a mountain brook in sunlight; his humor, frequently gay and bantering, often unpacks a hidden burden of pathos; his versification is mefodious; his diction, always polished, never careless, is as easy as if it were the author's natural breathing, yet as precise in its aptness as though it had had long elaboration.

His first poem of note after his Harvard commencement poem, was entitled "Old Ironsides," published in the Boston Advertiser. It began,

"Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!" and was a spirited protest against the proposal to break up the historical old frigate Constitution. It is said to have kept the ship from destruction. Two humorous pieces which gave him much repute appeared during his year in Harvard Law School, "Evening, by a Tailor," and "The Height of the Ridiculous." The first admirably illustrates his early style of playfulness and artistic punning. In 1836 he read before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard his "Poetry, a Metrical Essay," which was included in his first volume of poems, forty-five in number, published the same year. The little book contained also "The Last Leaf," "My Aunt," and "The September Gale." Subsequent volumes of poems were Urania: a Rhymed Lesson (1846); Astræa: the Balance of Illusions, Phi Beta Kappa poem at Yale (1850); Songs in Many Keys (1861); Soundings from the Atlantic (1864), a collection of miscellaneous articles contributed to The Atlantic Monthly; Songs in Many Seasons (1875); The Iron Gate (1880); A Mortal Antipathy (1885); and Before the Curfew (1888). The Iron Gate was read at a breakfast given in his honor by the publishers of The Atlantic Monthly, on his seventieth birthday. Dr. Holmes' verse gives voice to a great diversity of moods. Among his most admired serious poems are those inspired by patriotism during the war of the rebellion; also The Chambered Nautilus," "The Voiceless," "Sun and Shadow," and "Grandmother's Story." Many of his humorous poems have become universal favorites: "The Wonderful One-hoss Shay" is a specimen of this class, in addition to others previously named. His power of merciless satire appears in The Moral Bully.

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In prose, besides his scientific works, his novels and his remarkable series of colloquial disquisitions, to be more

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