Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. ( born August 29, 1809 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, † October 7, 1894 in Boston ) was an American physician and writer.

Life

Oliver Wendell Holmes was born as the son of Abiel Holmes, a cleric, historian and writer, and his second wife Sarah Wendell. He attended Phillips Academy in Andover (Massachusetts ) and studied at Harvard University and medicine in Paris later. Especially in Paris, he came up with progressive ideas in his field in contact. So he heard, among other lectures of Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis (1787-1872), on the introduction of statistical methods goes back into medicine and was a vehement opponent of bloodletting to treat febrile diseases. After completing his studies at Harvard, Holmes was a professor of physiology and anatomy, first in Harvard itself, then at Dartmouth College.

Holmes belongs - next to the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis - the first doctors who held a transfer of puerperal fever by the attending staff on the maternity cases likely. In 1843 he published one of his then revolutionary essay entitled "The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever " (engl. " The infectivity of puerperal fever " ), in which he, the question of a possible link between the hygienic conditions that prevail in childbirth, and the occurrence of this disease poses. So if every doctor who in his practice, only a single case is staying puerperal fever, the moral obligation to clean his instruments, to burn all the clothes he had worn in childbirth, and then for six months or not more than to be obstetricians working. How Semmelweis, who attempted few years later also noted in a publication to such a context, even Holmes was first attacked violently by his colleagues, even though the child bed fever -related maternal mortality in New England could be reduced dramatically demonstrated by the implementation of the measures it proposes. Only towards the end of the 19th century sat down with the observations made by Louis Pasteur germ theory, and thus the realization that it is a preventable infectious disease in puerperal fever, finally through.

In addition, Holmes developed a stereoscope in 1861, which received wide coverage. To him the term anesthesia goes back, he exchanged letters with William TG Morton coined for the then new method of anesthesia ( Morton, a dentist, had first publicly demonstrated an ether anesthesia ).

The writer

As a poet, became Holmes in 1830 with the poem " Old Ironsides " national celebrity. The poem on the frigate USS Constitution, which was to be decommissioned, the American public touched so much that a campaign against the scrapping of the ship began. 1835, the USS Constitution was made after a Congress decision in service and is still the oldest sea-going warship in the world.

Holmes, who is included in the circle of the "Fireside Poets ", thereby trained to models such as Alexander Pope and Oliver Goldsmith wrote and dignified, often gently ironic poems, also three novels. From the establishment of the sheet on, he was editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Especially his breakfast -table- writings, collections of essays, anecdotes and poetry house became known. In addition to James Russell Lowell and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, he was one of the leading intellectuals of Boston, received following a dictum of Holmes as " Brahmins of Boston " in the literary history of the United States. Until the 20th century he was considered one of the most important American poets. Today, he is, like the other " Brahmins ", disappeared from the curricula.

In 1840 he married Amelia Lee Jackson, daughter of Charles Jackson, Judge of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts. He was the father of the lawyer and Civil War hero Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Holmes died in 1894 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is buried in the Mount Auburn Cemetery.