Oliver Wendell Holmes: Physician and Man of Letters (review)

This is an inspired book, especially its first half. It caps a decade of work that restores the elder Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–94), the poet laureate of the breakfast table, to the fame and acclaim he enjoyed in his own day. He gave us many words and phrases that we still use today such as anesthesia and anesthetic, the Brahmin class, and the name for the Atlantic Monthly for which he wrote much after its founding in 1857, and it was Holmes who called his city of Boston the Hub of the Universe. For much of the twentieth century it was his son, of the same name, who enjoyed far more renown than his father. The younger Holmes, especially after publication of his book on the common law in the early 1880s and then during and after his long tenure on the Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932, seemed to have eclipsed the fame of his father. This book and the authors of the essays about the elder Holmes will do much to restore the balance.

Six informative essays compose nearly the first half of the book. The sensitive sketch of the life and afterlife of Holmes by Charles Bryan clearly establishes his subject as a premiere medical man of letters. In the second essay, John Haller, author of the best history of homeopathy in America, describes the reasons for the popularity as well as the controversy over Holmes’s two essays on homeopathy and what he called its kindred delusions. Haller as well as Charles Rosenberg, in his essay on Holmes’s therapeutic notions, both clearly describe the medical context of Boston and the rest of the country in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Amalie Kass, the author of a biography of the Boston obstetrician Walter Channing, writes about the 1843 Holmes essay on puerperal fever that more than any other single work permanently established its author’s reputation. The lack of much response in the immediate years after its publication and then the ridicule to which the essay and its author were subjected in the next decade never caused Holmes to back away from his firm belief that it was members of his own profession who passed the disease on to their patients in labor. The Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis, with much more statistical data, clearly deserved credit as well, but it was Holmes who first alerted his medical brethren. It seems fitting that Charles Rosenberg, who has written one of the most widely cited articles on the methods and meanings of therapeutics of the nineteenth-century physician, should now write the article about Holmes’s “Currents and Counter-currents in Medical Science,” one of the most cited articles on the therapeutics of his own time in the 1860s. In a typically nuanced manner, Rosenberg manages to put Holmes’s therapeutics, learned at the bedside of the Paris hospitals during his two years of study in France in the early 1830s, into a sociological as well as a historical perspective.

The last two essays deal more with Holmes the literary man. Peter Gibian, author of the rich discussion in his book, Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation (2001), describes the genesis and popularity of the Breakfast Table series in the Atlantic Monthly that eventually resulted in three books. Michael Weinstein, author of The Imaginative Prose of Oliver Wendell Holmes (2006), focuses especially on the three novels that Holmes wrote and that he himself referred to as his “medicated novels.” Weinstein in his book and in his essay claims for Holmes an important place in the history of depth psychology.

The slightly larger second half of the book is devoted to the “Quotable Holmes.” Some of his many poems, snippets of his medical and nonmedical essays, and the novels are divided into 250 pieces from...