Holmes, Oliver Wendell 1809-94
US physician and writer

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he graduated at Harvard College in 1829, and, giving up law for medicine, spent two years in hospitals in Europe. He was Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Dartmouth College (1839-40), and in 1842 discovered that puerperal fever, which killed mothers and newborns in huge numbers, was contagious. From 1847 to 1882 he was Professor of Anatomy at Harvard. Although he began writing verse while an undergraduate, it was 20 years later that The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1857-58) made him famous. This was followed by The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1858-59) and The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872). Elsie Venner (1859-60) was the first of three novels, foreshadowing modern 'Freudian' fiction. He published several volumes of poetry, starting with Songs in Many Keys (1862), and also wrote Our Hundred Days in Europe (1887), an account of a visit made in 1886.

Bibliography: E P Hoyt, The Improper Bostonian (1979); J T Morse (jnr), Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes (1896)