Henry Ingersoll Bowditch and Oliver Wendell Holmes: stethoscopists and reformers

Two Bostonians, Henry Ingersoll Bowditch (1808-1892) and Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894), went to Paris for advanced medical training and came home ardent disciples of Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis, leader of the French school that derived its eminence from expert auscultation and careful correlation of bedside and autopsy findings. Both Bowditch and Holmes became leaders in 19th-century American medicine. Bowditch, a successful practitioner and prolific medical writer, wrote the first important American text on physical examination and became our first specialist in pulmonary disease. He pioneered in the public health movement, was a charter member and later president of the American Medical Association, and was an abolitionist and an advocate for equal rights for women in medicine. Holmes left practice to become a medical educator. As Dean of Harvard Medical School, he tried unsuccessfully to admit white women and free black men to the school. Although his greatest fame came as a man of letters, Holmes considered himself first a physician and medical educator, and was justifiably proud of his definitive study, "The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever" (1843). Today, Bowditch and Holmes are little appreciated as pioneers and reformers, but we remain in debt to them both.     

Poetry, physiology, and puerperal fever: understanding the young Oliver Wendell Holmes

The 19th-century American physician Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) is known, internationally, more for his literary output than for his contributions to medical science. Yet a single paper he wrote in 1843--"The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever"--has made him a hero in the eyes of many (especially in the United States) of the struggle against that scourge. Why that one article, written when Holmes was still in his thirties, should--even in its expanded 1855 version--so routinely be referred to as a "classic of medical literature", and why its author should have been raised on such a high pedestal that some grant him a position beside Ignác Semmelweis, are complicated questions. This present paper is an attempt to begin assessing what it is that makes someone a medical hero by looking at three different aspects of Holmes's early career. He was even as a young man a poet and a physiologist/anatomist as well as the author of this important essay. Whether and how those three features of Holmes's many-sides public persona are connected is discussed as a prelude to considering whether his work on puerperal fever legitimates his status as a medical hero.     

Oliver Wendell Holmes : “Miscuit utile dulci”

The life of Oliver Wendell Holmes was selected as the subject for a lecture in the 1974 History of Medicine series at Yale University School of Medicine because, as the Latin subtitle of the essay suggests, he represents a fortunate and uncommon, but by no means unique, synthesis of the practical and aesthetic, of science and the humanities. An attempt has been made by the lecturer, employing frequent, but brief, excerpts from the works of several disinguished biographers as well as Doctor Holmes' own lectures, medical papers, essays and poems to delineate the elite heritage and the events that led this complex person transiently into the sudy of law, the profession in which his older son reached the pinnacle of the U.S. Supreme Court, and finally into medicine where a short period of private practice was followed by more than three decades of distinguished teaching is anatomy. His lifetime (1809-1894) spanned most of the nineteenth century, in the literary hisory of which he played a significant role. His writings reveal a remarkable, and sometimes prophetic, appreciation of the impact that burgeoning science and evolving social pressures and changes would have on the teaching and practice of medicine in the future—our present.