Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/564

NAME HOLMES 542 HOLMES graduated from the medical side of Willa- mette University, Oregon, 1877 ; from the Long Island College Hospital in 1880, and after- wards attended post-graduate schools in New York City and Harvard University. He held the membership in the American Gynecological Society, British Gynecological Society, British Medical Association and Oregon State Medical Society of which he was also president. His practice was exclusively gynecology and ob- stetrics, and from 1894 till death he was pro- fessor of gynecology at the Willamette Uni- versity and the Portland Hospital. His chief characteristic was his earnest in- terest in his work, and his putting aside all other business to equip himself for it. His wife was Olivia Ernestine Swegle of Salem, Oregon, whom he married in 1877. They had one son, Guy Paul. In the autumn of 1895 Holmes and his as- sociates felt compelled to resign from the Portland Hospital Staff; a heated discussion followed and Holmes was attacked and shot in three places by a physician who sustained the management. It was probably in conse- quence of injuries received at this time that intestinal complications arose, necessitating an abdominal operation while he was in a bad state of health. He never rallied, and died from the operation, on October 21, 1896. He was the author of various gynecological articles in the Transactions of the Oregon State Medical Society, 1892-3; "Ventral Fix- ation in Displacements of the Uterus," Pacific Medical Record, February, 1893; "First Sym- physiotomy on the Pacific Coast," New York Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics, July, 1893; "A Year's Work in Surgical Gynecology, including Thirty-one Celiotomies without a Death or Stitch-hole Abscess," Medical Sen- tinel, January, 1894; "A New Pelvic Drainage Tube," Medical Record, March 1893 ; "Ventro- fixation in Extreme Anterior Displacement of the Uterus," Journal of Amcrical Medical As- sociation, August 11, 1894; "Viburnum Pruni- folium," idem, October 27; "Gonorrhea as an Etiological Factor in Diseases of Women," address before the Oregon State Medical So- ciety, June 12, 1895. Howard A. Kelly. Trans. Amer. Gyn. Soc, 1897, vol. xxii. Med. Sentinel. Portland, Oregon, Nov., 1896. Holmes, Oliver Wendell (1809-1894). Oliver Wendell Holmes was born in Cam- bridge, Massachusetts, August 29, 1809, and died there October 7, 1894, the son of Abiel Holmes, pastor of the first church in Cam- bridge. The genealogy of the Holmes family dates from Thomas Holmes, lawyer of Gray's Inn, London, in the sixteenth century, and the first Holmes who came to this country was John, one of the first settlers of Woodstock, Connecticut, in 1686. The mother of Oliver Wendell Holmes was Sarah Wendell, a de- scendant of Thomas Dudley, governor of Massachusetts Bay from 1634-40 and from 1645-50. When Oliver was fifteen he was sent to Phillips Academy in Andover, and afterwards entered Harvard College, from which he grad- uated with the famous class of 1829. Through- out his course he held a good record in schol- arship and was also socially popular. After graduation he spent one year in the law school, and then turned to medicine, studying in the Harvard Medical School under Dr. James Jackson ( q. v.) and his associates, for two and a half years, and before taking his medical de- gree spending three years in Europe, in the hospitals and lecture-rooms of Paris and Edin- burgh. He took his medical degree, joined the Massachusetts Medical Society, and began to practise in Boston in 1836. In the same year he won the Boylston Prize Essay for a disserta- tion on "Intermittent Fever in New England," and in the following year, two prizes for dis- sertations 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 himself 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 practitioners. At a later period he forewarned his stu- dents: "Medicine is the most difficult of sci- ences and the most laborious of arts. It will task all your powers of body and mind if you arc faithful to it. Do not dabble in the muddy sewer of politics, nor linger by the en- chanted streams of literature, nor dig in far- oflf fields for the hidden waters of alien sci- ences. The great practitioners are generally those who concentrate all their powers on their business." He had learned the truth of these rules not by the practise of them, but by suf- fering from the breach of them. When he said that the smallest fevers were thankfully re- ceived, 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 j'oung joker was likely to do. In this they were in error; for