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

The title of this book might lead readers to expect a straightforward biography of Dr. O. W. Holmes, in which his literary life and his medical life are both treated. In fact, it is a more unusual (one might even say curious) volume, a veritable troika of a book. Part I comprises six essays that do indeed constitute a mini-biography of Holmes, though not neatly divided between an examination of the physician's life on the one hand and the life of the man of letters on the other. Part II, "The Quotable Holmes," is devoted to a rich selection of examples of Holmes at his literary, medical, sagacious, and witty best. What might have been called Part III (though it was not) is the previously unpublished introductory lecture that Holmes gave on 26 September 1879 to the incoming first-year class at Harvard Medical School. Each of these parts has considerable merit.

Part I opens appropriately enough with the only strictly biographical feature of the book, Charles S. Bryan's "Overview of a Life." Given the complexity of Holmes's career, Bryan does a neat and compact job of setting the stage and summarizing what the man was all about. The next three essays explore three of Holmes's most important (and well-known) papers on medical topics. John S. Haller, Jr., reviews Holmes on homeopathy; Amalie M. Kass gives useful background on and a good analysis of Holmes's exploration of the putative contagiousness of puerperal fever; and Charles E. Rosenberg does an outstanding job of putting Holmes's supposed therapeutic nihilism in context.

The final two essays, which at first blush appear to be about Holmes the man of letters, demonstrate that the book's title is somewhat misleading: Peter Gibian's discussion of Holmes's "Life in Conversation" and Michael A. Weinstein's "Reconstruction" of Holmes's view on depth psychology clearly show that even in his "literary" mode, Holmes's concerns were, as a rule, manifestly medical. As Gibian points out at the end of his essay, Holmes's "destabilizing conversational dynamics are of a piece with his medical stance" on, for instance, "therapeutic skepticism" (92). This emphasis is hardly surprising in a book edited by medical historians; furthermore, taken together, the six essays provide readers with not only an overview of Holmes's life but a welcome and deep understanding of his thinking.

"The Quotable Holmes"—Part II—is more problematic. As Scott H. Podolsky points out in his preface, "one reads many of these quotes in isolation at one's own risk" (xiii); there is simply too much to soak up, however delightful, stimulating, and revealing of Holmes any one of the passages might be. Nor are all of these roughly five hundred passages as "quotable" (in the sense of pithy, easily memorable bon mots) as the section's title seems to promise. Many are paragraph length, helpful in that some context is provided, but the overall effect of so much wit and wisdom run on for pages may strike some as daunting and not so useful as "quotable" seemed to promise. To be sure, the quotations are carefully grouped—first under the separate rubrics of "Holmes the Physician" and "Holmes the Man of Letters" and then further subdivided into a considerable array of broad topics (such as "Medical Science," "Medical Art," "Medical Practice"), in the first instance, and even more sweepingly general topics ("The Human Condition," "Epistemology, Wisdom, and Truth," "Society and the Body Politic") in the second. No index is included of the sort that makes quotable nuggets so easy to access in, for example, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (e.g., Boston: Little, Brown, Centennial Edition, 1955). All the quotations make for good reading, as one would expect from Holmes. To read straight through Part II is certainly to partake of a feast, but...