Oliver Wendell Holmes

Oliver Wendell Holmes was born in 1809 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the son of a minister. He gave up law for medicine, studied in Paris, and taught anatomy and physiology at Harvard from 1847 to 1882, serving for a time as head of the faculty. From 1843 he maintained that puerperal fever was carried from patient to patient by the physicians themselves, a thesis that earned him the hostility of his colleagues. An early poem helped to save a famous frigate from demolition. The father of the Supreme Court justice of the same name, he died in Boston in 1894.

In the catalogue 1

• EssayThe Autocrat of the Breakfast-TableOliver Wendell Holmes · 1857LiteraturePublic domain