Page:The Biographical Dictionary of America, vol. 05.djvu/344

 HOLMES

HOLMES

tive and poetic nature and from early man- hood he was an aggressive Unitarian in direct opposition to the Calvinism of his fatlier. He first attended a " dame school." kept by Mrs. Pren- tiss, and from his tenth until his fifteenth year he continued his education at a school in Cambridge- port, under Winslow Biglow, where he had as classmates Richard Henry Dana, Margaret Ful- ler, and Alfred Lee, afterward bishop of Dela- ware. From Caml)ridge he was sent to Pliillips academy at Andover, Mass.. with the hope that he might incline to the ministry. There he made his first attempt at rhyme in the translation of the first book of Vergil's '•^•Eneid." He was graduated from Harvard in 1829 with William H. Channing, Prof. Benjamin Pierce, James Freeman Clarke, the Rev. S. F. Smith, and Benjamin R. Curtis. He roomed in Stoughton hall ; was a frequent contributor to college publications ; wrote and delivered the poem at commencement, and was one of sixteen of that class whose sciiolarship admitted tliem to the Phi Beta Kappa society. His cousin, Wendell Pliillips, Ciiarles Sumner and John Lothrop Motley were in attendance at Har-

HoLMES HOUSE <:aa\bp,ic><:e,mass vard. altliough not his classmates. He attended the Dane law school in 1829, remaining one year, and in that year devoted more time to verse writing than he did to Blackstone. In 1830, on reading a newspaper paragraph to the effect that the frigate Constitution was condemned by the navy department to be destroyed, lie wrote on the impulse of the moment " Old Ironsides " which appeared first in the Boston Daili/ Advertiser, and quickly travelled tiirough eveiy newspaper in the L'nited States, saving the vessel from destruction and bringing fame to the author. The following year he studied medicine at a private school under Dr. James Jackson, and in 18:33 studied in the hospitals of Paris and London, spending his vaca- tions in travel. He returned to Cambridge in December, 183"), received the M.D. degree from Harvanl in 1836, and at once commenced his professional career. The same year he publislied hi-< first volume of poems, which contained forty- five pieces. He received three of the Boylston

prizes for medical dissertations and the three essay's were publislied in 1838. He was professor of anatomy and physiology in Dartmouth college, 1838-40. On June 15, 1840, he was married to Amelia Lee, third daughter of Charles Jackson, of Boston, associate justice of the supreme ju- dicial court. The young pair settled in Boston, Mass.. where Dr. Holmes engaged in general practice. He bought a house in Montgomery place, which afterward became Bosworth sti'eet, and there his three children were born : Oliver Wendell, March 8, 1841 ; Amelia Lee, who died in 1889, and Edward Jackson, who died in 1884. His wife died at their Beacon street home in 1888. In 1843 he publislied an essay on the "Conta- giousness of Puerperal Fever," and on this rests his claim to having made an original and valuable discovery for medical science, which called forth at the time a most hostile argument from the two leading American professors of obstetrics. Profes- sors H. L. Hodge and C. D. Meigs, of Philadel- phia. He was appointed Parkinan professor of anatoni}' and physiologj' at Harvard L^niversity Medical school in 1847, and occasionally over- stepped the strict boundaries of these depart- ments to give instruction in mici-oscopy, psychol- ogy and kindred subjects. He relinquished his medical practice and was dean of the medical school, 1847-53. In 1849 he built a house at Pitts- field, Mass., upon the old family place on the road to Lenox, in a township which had belonged to one of his Dutch ancestors in 1735, and there spent his summers until 1856, having as neigh- bors and associates, Nathaniel Hawthorne. G. P. R. James, Herman Melville, Miss Sedgwick and Fanny Kemble. In 1852 he delivered in several cities a course of lectures on the " English Poets of the Nineteenth Century," twelve of which were given before the Lowell Institute. Dr. Holmes was a favorite with the lecture bureaus, and had no lack of engagements ; and in his medical lec- tures at Harvard the last period was assigned to him, because he alone could holdtheattention of his exhausted audience, listening to the fifth consecutive lecture. As a lecturer he was in- teresting, original and stimulating. He was wont to speak of occupying not a "chair," but a " settee " of medicine. He invented the arrange- ment of the stereoscope, afterward universally used, but obtained no patent for an article from which he might have inade a fortune, "not car- ing," as he expressed it, " to be known as the patentee of a pill or of a peeping contrivance." He was one of the founders of the Atlantic Monthly in 1857. and gave the magazine its name, contributing to it a series of conversa- tional papers entitleil "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" (1^^58), which c-ontained some of his best i)oems. Tiiis was followed by a second