Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/549

HOLMES chair. Holmes held the Parkman professorship for thirty-five years, until 1882, when he resigned. In 1871 a new professorship of physiology was created and the Parkman professorship became limited to anatomy. Holmes was dean of the Medical School from 1847–53, and as such was always accessible to students, ever ready with kindly counsel and disposed to be lenient.

He became very popular as a lecturer on anatomy, and noted for the witty allusions with which he enlivened his five weekly lectures delivered at one o'clock, an hour assigned him because it was the last of the five or six continuous hours of lectures which the student had to attend, and he alone of the lecturers could hold their attention at this time. Both Dr. D. W. Cheever and Prof. T. Dwight have given entertaining accounts of Holmes as a teacher of anatomy: "It is near one o'clock," says Dr. Cheever "and the close work in the demonstrator's room in the Old Medical School in North Grove Street becomes even more hurried and eager as the lecture hour in anatomy approaches. Four hours of busy dissection have unveiled a portion of the human frame, insensate and stark, on the demonstrating-table. Muscles, nerves and blood-vessels unfold themselves in unvarying harmony, if seeming disorder, and the 'subject' is nearly ready to illustrate the lecture. . . . The room is thick with tobacco smoke. The winter light, snowy and dull, enters through one tall window, bare of curtain, and falls upon a lead floor. The surroundings are singularly bare of ornament or beauty, and there is naught to inspire the intellect or the imagination, except the marvellous mechanism of the poor dead body, which lies dissected before us like some complex and delicate machinery whose uses we seek to know."

To such a scene enters the port, the writer, the wit, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Few readers of his prose or poetry could dream of him as here in this charnel-house, in the presence of death. The very long, steep, and single flight of stairs leading up from the street below resounds with a double and labored tread, the door opens, and a small, gentle, smiling man appears, supported by the janitor who often has been called on to help him up the stairs. Entering, and giving a breathless greeting, he sinks upon a stool and strives to recover his asthmatic breath. . . . Anon recovering, he brightens up and asks, "What have you for me today?" and plunges, knife in hand, into the "depths of his subject" — a joke he might have uttered. Time flies, and a crowd of turbulent Bob Sawyers pours through the hall to his lecture-room, and begins a rhythmical stamping, one, two, three, and a shout, and pounding on his lecture-room doors. A rush takes place; some collapse, some are thrown headlong, and three hundred raw students precipitate themselves into a bare and comfortless amphitheatre. Meanwhile the professor has been running about, now as nimble as a cat, selecting plates, rummaging the dusty museum for specimens, arranging microscopes, and displaying bones. The subject is carried in on a board; no automatic appliances, no wheels with pneumatic tires, no elevators, no dumb-waiters in those days. The cadaver is decorously disposed on a revolving table in the small arena, and is always covered, at first, from curious eyes, by a clean white sheet. Respect for poor humanity and admiration for God's divinest work is tin; first lesson and the uppermost in the poet-lecturer's mind. He enters, and is greeted with a mighty shout and stamp of applause. Then silence, and there begins a charming hour of description, 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