Holmes

Amelia (Mrs. Turner Sargent); and Edward
Jackson Holmes, a Boston lawyer, who died in
1884, leaving a son of the same name,

Leslie Stephen has written of Holmes (Stud-
ies of a Biographer, vol. II, 1898, p. 167), "few
popular authors have had a narrower escape
from obscurity.'1 From the time of his marriage
in 1840, when he was thirty-one, until the estab-
lishment of the Atlantic Monthly in 1857, when
he was forty-eight, he was indeed proceeding on
a path which could not conceivably have brought
him into the place he came at length to occupy.
What he did was abundantly worth doing, and
he did it well. It was chiefly the work of a medi-
cal writer and teacher. In the first of these two
functions he made some name for himself earlier
than in the second. The Boylston Prize Disser-
tations were followed, in 1842, by two lectures,
published as a pamphlet, Homeopathy and its
Kindred Delusions. In the next year he read be-
fore the Boston Society for Medical Improve-
ment, and published as a pamphlet, after printing
in the New England Quarterly Journal of Medi-
cine and Surgery, the paper on "The Contagious-
ness of Puerperal Fever/* which is commonly
counted his best contribution to the progress of
medicine. Written long before the days of mod-
ern bacteriology, this paper gave evidence of a
close study of well-attested facts, assembled by
one possessing a wide knowledge of the medical
literature of Great Britain and France as well as
that of the United States. The presentation of
the subject was altogether scholarly, but there
were many in the medical profession who were
not ready to accept the conclusions drawn by
Holmes from his facts. Two leading professors
and practitioners of obstetrics in Philadelphia,
H. L. Hodge and C D. Meigs [qq.v."], attempted,
respectively nine and eleven years after Holmes's
pamphlet appeared, to oppose its teachings in
pamphlets of their own. This resulted in a re-
printing of the pamphlet in 1855, with an intro-
duction, quietly standing by his position and de-
claring, "I take no offence, and attempt no re-
tort. No man makes a quarrel with me over the
counterpane that covers a mother, with a new-
born infant at her breast.'* Convinced in later
years that his essay had served a really valuable
purpose, he wrote (Medical Essays, ed. 1891, p.
105), "I do not know that I shall ever again have
so good an opportunity of being useful as was
granted me by the raising of the question which
produced this Essay."

In the field of teaching he did not come fully
Into his own until 1847, when he was appointed
Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology
in the Harvard Medical School. This chair, so

Holmes

extended in its functions that he enjoyed calling
it a "settee," he occupied under its full title until
1871, remaining from that time forth Parkman
Professor of Anatomy until 1882, then becoming
professor emeritus for the remaining twelve
years of his life. From 1847 to ^53 he served
also as dean of the Harvard Medical School.
His devotion of thirty-five years to active teach-
ing explains the prominence assigned to the
term, "Teacher of Anatomy," as the words pre-
ceding "Essayist" and "Poet" on the mural tab-
let to his memory in King's Chapel, Boston.

In addition to the sound, fundamental knowl-
edge of the subject of anatomy which Holmes
acquired in the Paris hospitals, he possessed un-
common gifts as a lecturer. "The Professor's
chair," he once wrote (Medical Essays, p. 426)
"is an insulating stool, so to speak; his age, his
knowledge, real or supposed, his official station,
are like the glass legs which support the electri-
cian's piece of furniture, and cut it off from the
common currents of the floor upon which it
stands." Realizing the perils of such a situation,
Holmes was at once vigilant and competent to
surmount them. Classes of medical students are
notoriously among the most difficult of audi-
ences. Because he could be counted upon pecul-
iarly to hold them, it was to him that the last of
the five morning lectures at the School—from
one to two o'clock—was assigned. The exhaust-
ed students would have expressed then, if ever,
their disapproval of an inadequate lecturer.
What really happened is suggested by the remi-
niscence of a pupil: "He enters, and is greeted
by a mighty shout and stamp of applause. Then
silence, and there begins a charming hour of de-
scription, analysis, simile, anecdote, harmless
pun, which clothes the dry bones with poetic
imagery, enlivens a hard and fatiguing day with
humor, and brightens to the tired listener the de-
tails for difficult though interesting study" (Life
and Letters, I, 176).

In these years before Holmes took his place as
a popular writer, he was exercising his gifts as
a lecturer far beyond the walls of the Med-
ical School, It was the time of the Lyceum, an
institution of extraordinary popularity, through
which the best minds, in a period of intellectual
and spiritual flowering in American letters that
can be defined with some excuse as "Augustan,"
displayed themselves on the lecture platform to
the delight and profit of insatiable audiences.
Emerson and Lowell endured much in meeting
and influencing large numbers of the American
public, in many places, through this medium.
Holmes, handicapped by his asthma from more
extensive travel, was also in great demand. In

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