Person Page - 309

He was a descendant of John Holmes, who settled at Woodstock, Conn., in 1686, and of Evert Jansen Wendell, who emigrated from Eraden, East Friesland, Holland, and settled in Albany, N.Y., about 1640. His paternal grandfather was a captain in the British colonial army in the French and Indian war, and later served as a surgeon in the Revolutionary army. His father, a graduate in theology from Yale, and an earnest Calvinist, was pastor for forty years over the First Church, Cambridge. Mass.

The religious training of Oliver's childhood made a deep impression upon his sensitive and poetic nature and from early manhood he was an aggressive Unitarian in direct opposition to the Calvinism of his father. He first attended a "dame school," kept by Mrs. Prenriss, and from his tenth until his fifteenth year he continued his education at a school in Cambridge-port, under Winslow Biglow, where he had as classmates Richard Henry. Dana, Margaret Fuller, and Alfred Lee, afterward bishop of Delaware. From Cambridge he was sent to Phillips academy at Andover, Mass., with the hope that he might incline to the ministry. There he made his first attempt at rhyme in the translation of the first book of Vergil's Æneid? He was graduated from Harvard in 1829 with William H. Channing, Prof. Benjamin Pierce, James Freeman Clarke, the Rev. S. F. Smith, and Benjamin R. Curtis. He roomed in Sloughton ball; was a frequent contributor to college publications; wrote and delivered the poem at commencement, and was one of sixteen of that class whose scholarship admitted them to the Phi Beta Kappa society. His cousin, Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner and John Lothtop Motley were in attendance at Harvard, although not his classmates. He attended the Dane law school in 1899, remaining one year, and in that year devoted more the to verse writing than he did to Blackstone. In 1830, on reading a newspaper paragraph to the effect that the frigate Constitution was condemned by the navy department to be destroyed, he wrote on the impulse of the moment "Old Ironsides" which appeared first in the Boston Daily Advertiser, and quickly travelled through every newspaper in the United States, saving the vessel from destruction and bringing fame to the author. The following year he studied medicine at a private school under Dr. James Jackson, and in 1833 studied in the hospitals of Paris and London, spending his vacations in travel. He returned to Cambridge in December, 1835, received the M.D. degree from Harvard in 1836, and at once commenced his professional career. The same year he published his first volume of poems, which contained forty-five pieces. He received three of the Boylston prizes for medical dissertations and the three essays were published in 1838. He was professor of anatomy and physiology in Dartmouth college, 1838-40.

He bought a house in Montgomery place, which afterward became Bosworth street, and there his three children were born: His wife died at their Beacon street home in 1888. In 1843 he published an essay on the "Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever," and on this rests his claim to having made an original and valuable discovery for medical science, which called forth at the time a most hostile argument from the two leading American professors of obstetrics, Professors H. L. Hedge and C. D. Meigs, of Philadelphia. He was appointed Parkman professor of anatomy and physiology at Harvard University Medical school in 1847, and occasionally overstepped the strict boundaries of these departments to give instruction in microscopy, psychology and kindred subjects. He relinquished his medical practice and was dean of the medical school, 1847-53. In 1849 he built a house at Pittsfield, Mass., upon the old family place on the road to Lenox, in a township which had belonged to one of his Dutch ancestors in 1735, and there spent his summers until 1856, having as neighbors and associates, Nathaniel Hawthorne, G. P. R. James, Herman Melville, Miss Sedgwick and Fanny Kemble. In 1859 he delivered in several cities a course of lectures on the English Poets of the Nineteenth Century, twelve of which were given before the Lowell Institute. Dr. Holmes was a favorite with the lecture bureaus, and had no lack of engagements; and in his medical lectures at Harvard the last period was assigned to him, because he alone could hold the attentlon of his exhausted audience, listening to the fifth consecutive lecture. As a lecturer he was interesting, original and stimulating. He was wont to speak of occupying not a "chair," but a "settee" of medicine. He invented the arrangement of the stereoscope, afterward universally used, but obtained no patent for an article from which he might have made a fortune, "not caring," as he expressed it, "to be known as the patentee of a pill or of a peeping contrivance."

He was one of the founders of the Atlantic Monthly in 1857, and gave the magazine its name, contributing to it a series of conversational papers entitled The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858), which contained some of his best poems. This was followed by a second series, The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1859), and after a long interval, appeared The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872). He contributed to the Atlantic the serial novels: Elsie Venner (1861); The Guardian Angel (1867); A Mortal Antipathy (1885); Our Hundred Days in Europe (1887); Over the Teacups (1890). He was identified with the magazine more closely than any other person, and for a longer period. On Dec. 3, 1879, the editors gave a breakfast in his honor, he having passed his seventieth birthday, and Dr. Holmes read the poem The Iron Gate, written for the occasion. He removed from Montgomery place to a house on Charles street, on the riverside, in 1867, and in 1870 to Beacon street, where he lived the rest of his days, making Beverly Farms his summer home. He resigned his professorship at Harvard in 1882, and was immediately made professor emeritus, a rare distinction for Harvard to confer. From that time he lived a retired life in Boston, but continued his writings, "full of the same shrewd sense, wise comment and tender thought" that characterized them from the start. He made a second visit to Europe in 1886, with his daughter, and was everywhere warmly welcomed. He spent most of the time in England and Scotland, where he received the degree of D.C.L. from Oxford university, and that of LL.D. from Edinburgh. He was often called "our poet of occasion," being always ready when called upon to contribute a poem or an essay, giving the best his genius afforded. His writing never wholly weaned him from the medical profession, which he loved strongly because he loved human nature. Besides the works already mentioned, he prepared with Dr. Jacob Bigelow, Marshall Hall's Theory and Practice of Medicine (1839); and is the author of: Lectures on Homoeopathy and its Kindred Delusions (1849); Report on Medical Literature (1848); Currents and Countercurrents in Medical Science (1861); Borderland in some Provinces of Medical Science (1862); Soundings from the Atlantic (1864); Mechanism in Thoughts and Morals (1871); Memoir of John Lothrop Motley (1879); Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1884); Before the Curfew (1888); poetry: Urania (1846); Astrea (1850); Songs in Many Keys (1861 ); Songs of Many Seasons (1875); The Iron Gate and Other Poems (1880). His poems were subsequently collected into three volumes under the title: The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes. See Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes, by John Torrey Morse, Jr. (1896), and Life of Holmes, by Emma E. Brown (rev. ed., 1895.)⁵

He was educated in the Boston schools and was graduated at Harvard (class poet) in 1861, while a volunteer soldier in the 4th battalion of infantry at Fort Independence. He was commissioned in the 20th Massachusetts volunteers as lieutenant; and was severely wounded at Bali's Bluff, Va., Oct. 21, 1861; at Antietam, Md., Sept. 17, 1862, and at Marye's Heights, Va., May 3, 1863. He was promoted lieutenant-colonel in 1863, but was not mustered in, as the regiment was too much reduced to permit it. He served as aide-de-camp on the staff of Gen. Horatio G. Wright from Jan. 29, 1864, until he was mustered out, July 17, 1864, with the rank of captain. He was graduated at Harvard law school, 1866, and in 1867 was admitted to the bar and began practice in Boston, Mass. He was instructor in constitutional law at Harvard law school, 1870-71; edited the American Law Review, 1870-73; lectured on common law before the Lowell Institute, 1880; was professor of law at Harvard law school, 1882-83; justice of the supreme court of Massachusetts, 1882-99, and became chief justice in August, 1899. He became a justice of the U.S. Suprelne Court, Dec. 4, 1902. He received the honorary degree of LL.D. from Yale in 1886 and from Harvard in 1895; and was elected a member of the Massachusetts Historical society and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He edited: Kent's Commentaries (12th ed., 1873), and is the author of The Common Law (1881); Speeches (1891, 1896), and various articles contributed to professional journals.⁴