He was born at
Cambridge, Massachusetts, the son of
Abiel Holmes (1763-1837), a Calvinist clergyman, avid historian, author of Annals of America (a critically praised work for which he was granted an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh) and of unnotable poetry, and his second wife, Sarah Wendell, of a prominent New York family. Through her, Dr. Holmes was descended from Massachusetts Governors
Thomas Dudley and
Simon Bradstreet and his wife, Dudley's daughter,
Anne Bradstreet, the first published American female poet. In 1840, Holmes married Amelia Lee Jackson, daughter of the
Hon. Charles Jackson (1775-1855), formerly Associate Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Their son was the Civil War hero and great American jurist
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
He was educated at
Phillips Academy in
Andover, Massachusetts, and at
Harvard College. In 1833 Holmes attended the famed École de Médecine in Paris. He pursued his medical studies in the Parisian hospital system, popularly viewed as the birthplace of modern medicine and the modern style of medical education, at institutions such as La Charité and La Pitié Salpêtrière. Holmes was a student of Dr.
Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis, who demonstrated the ineffectiveness of bloodletting as a treatment for fevers and other disorders, which method had been a mainstay of medical practice since antiquity. Dr. Louis was one of the fathers of the
méthode expectante, the therapeutic doctrine claiming that the physician's role was only to assist nature as it healed. Upon his return to Boston, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. became one of leading proponents of the
méthode expectante in America.. Holmes' M.D. was ultimately granted from Harvard, where he would later become Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology
He first attained national prominence with his poem
Old Ironsides about the
18th century frigate
USS Constitution, which was to be broken up for scrap; the poem generated public sentiment that resulted in the historic ship being preserved as a monument. One of his most popular works was
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. He was one of the five members of the group known as the
Fireside Poets. He contributed poems and essays to the
Atlantic Monthly from its inception, and also published novels. Holmes is also known for his writing of several beautiful hymns which are found by following this link:
http://www.cyberhymnal.org/bio/h/o/l/holmes_ow.htm
In 1843, Holmes published
The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever and controversially concluded that
puerperal fever was frequently carried from patient to patient by physicians and nurses. Holmes, along with
Ignaz Semmelweis in 1846, were the first to publish recommendations that healthcare workers wash their hands. Although his recommendations had little impact on health practices at the time, as a result of the seminal studies by Semmelweis and Holmes, handwashing gradually became accepted as one of the most important measures for preventing transmission of pathogens in health-care facilities. Holmes was also a vocal critic of
homeopathy. He published an essay
Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions in which he denounced the practice.
In 1846, in a letter to
William T. G. Morton, the
dentist who was the first practitioner to publicly demonstrate the use of
ether during
surgery, Holmes
coined the word
anesthesia. Dr. Holmes developed the popular model of the
stereoscope, a 19th century entertainment in which pictures were viewed in 3-D. He was widely known and admired during his life. The noted Sherlockian Michael Harrison conjectured that the British author
Arthur Conan Doyle drew one inspiration for his famous fictional detective
Sherlock Holmes from a real-life self-described "consulting detective" named
Wendel Scherer changing "Scherer" to "Sherlock" and "Wendel" to "Holmes" by association with Oliver Wendell Holmes.<Ref>Michael Harrison, A Study in Surmise, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, February 1971, p. 59.</Ref> For many years,
Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman was his private secretary.
There is a frequently repeated story about Dr. Holmes, but not always mentioning him by name. While awakening from ether induced unconsciousness, he strongly believed he had discovered the key to all the mysteries of the universe. He wrote down the secret, but when his head had cleared he found he'd written "A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout."
Holmes died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1894, and is buried in
Mount Auburn Cemetery.
The school library of
Phillips Academy in
Andover, MA is Oliver Wendell Holmes Library, or the OWHL.
