biography
| name: |
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1809–94)
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| biography:
| Physician, poet and writer, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. The son of a Congregational minister, he was his class poet at Harvard College, and stayed on to study law but changed to medicine. He spent two years studying medicine in Paris, then returned to take his MD from Harvard (1836) and start a private practice. In 1838–40 he taught anatomy at Dartmouth, but then returned to Boston to practise medicine. He invented an early stethoscope, suggested the term ‘anestesia’ (from the Greek for ‘no feeling’) for the state induced by the new gases, published two influential medical works, Homeopathy and Kindred Delusions (1842) and The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever (1843), and became Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Harvard (1847–82). But long before this he had been gaining a parallel reputation as a poet and writer. In 1830 his poem ‘Old Ironsides’ galvanized national sentiment to save the USS Constitution from destruction. While still a graduate student he published two essays in the New England Magazine under the title ‘The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table’ and in the late 1850s, The Atlantic Monthly, which he had founded in 1857 with James Russell Lowell, began to publish his essays and poems. The essays were collected in a book, The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table, and this led to several other collections of his essays. Two of his poems were household classics in their day, ‘The Chambered Nautilus’ and ‘The Deacon's Masterpiece’. He also wrote three novels about psychologically disturbed characters, of which Elsie Venner (1861) was the most successful. In 1885 he published a biography of his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson. |
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