Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes about 1894

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (born August 29, 1809 in Cambridge , Massachusetts ; died October 7, 1894 in Boston ) was an American doctor and writer .

Life

Oliver Wendell Holmes was born to Abiel Holmes , a cleric, historian, and writer, and his second wife Sarah Wendell. He attended the Phillips Academy in Andover (Massachusetts) and later studied medicine at Harvard University and in Paris . In Paris, in particular, he came into contact with progressive ideas in his field. Among other things, he heard lectures from Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis , to whom the introduction of statistical methods in medicine goes back and who was a vehement opponent of bloodletting for the treatment of febrile diseases. After completing his studies at Harvard, Holmes himself became a professor of physiology and anatomy , first at Harvard itself, then at Dartmouth College . In 1838 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1880 to the American Philosophical Society .

Along with the Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis , Holmes was one of the first medical professionals who believed that childbed fever was likely to be transmitted from the treating staff to those who have recently given birth . In 1843 he published one of his time-revolutionary essay entitled "The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever" (dt. "The infectiousness of puerperal fever" ), in which he the question of a possible link between the hygienic conditions that at a delivery prevail, and the Occurrence of this disease raises. Every doctor who has seen even a single case of puerperal fever in his practice is morally obliged to clean his instruments, burn all clothes he wore during delivery and then not for more than six months afterwards Obstetrician to take action. Like Semmelweis, who a few years later also tried to point out such a connection in a publication, Holmes was also initially hostile by his colleagues, although the implementation of the measures he proposed has demonstrably drastically reduced maternal mortality caused by childbed fever in New England . Only towards the end of the 19th century , with the observations made by Louis Pasteur, did the germ theory finally establish itself and with it the knowledge that childbed fever is a preventable infectious disease .

In addition, Holmes developed a stereoscope in 1861 , which was widely used. The term anesthesia also goes back to him, which he coined in an exchange of letters with William TG Morton for the then new method of anesthesia (Morton, a dentist , had publicly performed ether anesthesia for the first time ).

The writer

As a poet, Holmes achieved national fame as early as 1830 with the poem "Old Ironsides" . The poem of praise for the frigate USS Constitution , which was to be decommissioned, touched the American public so much that a campaign against the scrapping of the ship began. In 1835, the USS Constitution was put back into service after a Congressional resolution and is still the oldest seaworthy warship in the world.

Holmes, who belongs to the group of " Fireside Poets ", trained himself on role models such as Alexander Pope and Oliver Goldsmith and wrote solid, often gently ironic poems, as well as three novels . From the foundation of the paper he was editor of the Atlantic Monthly . His breakfast table writings, collections of essays , anecdotes and house poetry became particularly well known . Along with James Russell Lowell and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow , he was one of the leading intellectuals in Boston who, as Holmes said, went down in US literary history as the " Brahmin of Boston ". He was considered one of the most important American poets well into the 20th century. Today, like the other “Brahmins”, he has disappeared from the curriculum.

In 1840 he married Amelia Lee Jackson, daughter of Charles Jackson, Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice . He was the father of lawyer and Civil War hero Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Holmes died in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1894. He is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery.

literature

• Robert James Ball: Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and His Works: Being a Brief Biography and Critical Review, E. Stock, 1878 (NA Lightning Source Inc 2007, ISBN 978-1-4304-8249-9 )

Web links

Commons : Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.  - Collection of Images, Videos, and Audio Files

• Literature by and about Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. in the catalog of the German National Library
• The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever in the original text
• Illustration of Holmes' stereoscope - stereoscopic

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Member History: Oliver W. Holmes. American Philosophical Society, accessed October 2, 2018 (different date of death).