Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/565

NAME HOLMES 543 HOLMES a more anxious, painstaking, conscientious physician never counted pulse nor wrote the mystic If. (Morse, vol. i, p. 159.) For three years he was one of the physicians at the Massachusetts General Hospital. In 1838 he was appointed professor of anatomy at Dartmouth College, and held this chair in 1839 and 1840. It obliged him to be there during .'Kugust. September and October. In 1842 he published two essays on "Homeopathy," which still rank as the most brilliant exposition given by an opponent of homeopathy. In 1843 he published his essay on the "Contagiousness 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 conveyed 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 obste- tricians 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 like- wise met with opposition in Europe before his views were adopted. The rules for physicians engaged in obstetrics devised by Holmes are still eminently practical and valuable. In 1840 Holmes married Amelia Lee Jack- son, a daughter of Charles Jackson, formerly judge of the Supreme Court. Soon after, he resigned his professorship at Dartmouth Col- lege, in order to devote himself more strictly to practice. During the summer months, how- ever, he continued to deliver lectures before the Berkshire Medical Institution at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and lived there. He also en- gaged in teaching at the Tremont Street Medi- cal 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 pro- fessorship of anatomy and physiology, at the Harvard Medical School. The Hersey pro- fessorship, which had previously been held by John Warren and John Collins Warren, was transferred to Cambridge, and Jeffries Wyman was elected to fill the 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 con- tinuous 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 (q. v.) and Prof. T. Dwight (q. V.) have given entertaining ac- counts 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 hur- ried 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 them- selves in unvarying harmony, if seeming dis- order, 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 win- dow, 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, ex- cept 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 poet, 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 to-day?' 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 hi? lecture-room, and be- gins a rhythmical stamping, one, two, three, and a shout, and pounding on his lecture-room