Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/548

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the same year he won the Boylston Prize Essay for a dissertation on "In- termittent Fever in New England," and in the following year, two prizes for dissertations on the " Nature and Treatment of Neuralgia " and the "Utility and Importance of Direct Exploration in Medical Practice." In spite of these prize essays he built up only a fair practice. His literary talents kept him from devoting him- self as completely as he might to the practical side of his profession, while his boyish spirit, his jokes and his verses tended to make patients turn to more serious, if less gifted, practi- tioners.

At a later period he forewarned his students: "'Medicine is the most diffi- cult of sciences and the most laborious of arts. It will task all your powers of body and mind if you are faithful to it. Do not dabble in the muddy sewer of politics, nor linger by the enchanted streams of literature, nor dig in far-off fields for the hidden waters of alien sciences. The great practi- tioners are generally those who con- centrate all their powers on their busi- ness." He had learned the truth of these rules not by the practise of them, but by suffering from the breach of them. When he said that the smallest fevers were thankfully received, the people who had no fevers laughed, but the people who had them preferred some one who would take the matter more seriously than they thought this lively young joker was likely to do. In this they were in error; for a more anxious, painstaking, conscientious phy- sician never counted pulse nor wrote the mystic R. (Morse, vol. i, p. 159.)

For three years he was one of the physicians at the Massachusetts Gen- eral Hospital. In 1S3S he was appoint- ed professor of anatomy at Dartmouth College and held this chair in 1839 and 1840. It obliged him to be there August, September and October. In 1842 he published two essays on " Homeopathy " which still rank as the

HOLMES

most brilliant exposition given by an opponent of homeopathy. In 1843 he published his essay on the "Contagi- ousness of Puerperal Fever." This essay may justly be rated as a truly great contribution to medical science. Upon it rests Holmes's chief claim to a permanent reputation in medicine. In it he pointed out puerperal fever as frequently due to contagion con- veyed by the hands of the physician from one mother to another, or from a case of erysipelas to the child-bed. His views were opposed by the leading obstetricians of his day, but have since come to be generally recognized. The essay was published several years before the extended researches of Semmelweiss on the same subject, who likewise met with opposition in Europe before his views were adopted. The rules for phy- sicians engaged in obstetrics devised by Holmes are still eminently practical and valuable.

In 1S40 Holmes married Amelia Lee Jackson, a daughter of Charles Jackson, formerly judge of the Supreme Court. Soon after he resigned his professorship at Dartmouth College in order to devote himself more strictly to practice. During the summer months, however, he continued its deliver lectures before the Berkshire Medical Institute at Pittsfield, Mass- achusetts, and lived there. He also engaged in teaching at the Tremont Street Medical School, where courses supplementary to those of Harvard Medical School were given. About this time he edited, in conjunction with Dr. Bigelow, an American edition of Marshall Hall's text-book on the "Theory and Art of Medicine."

In 1847, when thirty-eight, Holmes was elected to the newly established Parkman professorship of anatomy and physiology at the Harvard Medical School. The Hersey professorship, which had previously been held by John Warren and John Collins Warren, was transferred to Cambridge, and Jeffries Wyman was elected to fill the