Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (; August 29, 1809 – October 7, 1894) was an American physician, poet, and polymath based in Boston. Grouped among the fireside poets, he was acclaimed by his peers as one of the best writers of the day. His most famous prose works are the "Breakfast-Table" series, which began with The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858). He was also an important medical reformer. In addition to being an author and a poet, Holmes was also a physician, professor, lecturer, and inventor.
Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Holmes was educated at Phillips Academy and Harvard College. After graduating from Harvard in 1829, he briefly studied law before turning to the medical profession. He began writing poetry at an early age; one of his most famous works, "Old Ironsides", was published in 1830 and was influential in the eventual preservation of the USS Constitution. Following training at the prestigious medical schools of Paris, Holmes was granted his Doctor of Medicine degree from Harvard Medical School in 1836. He taught at Dartmouth Medical School before returning to teach at Harvard and, for a time, served as dean there. During his long professorship, he became an advocate for various medical reforms and notably posited the then-controversial idea that doctors were capable of carrying puerperal fever from patient to patient. Holmes retired from Harvard in 1882 and continued writing poetry, novels and essays until his death in 1894.
Surrounded by Boston's literary elite—which included friends such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell—Holmes made an indelible imprint on the literary world of the 19th century. Many of his works were published in The Atlantic Monthly, a magazine that he named. For his literary achievements and other accomplishments, he was awarded numerous honorary degrees from universities around the world. Holmes's writing often commemorated his native Boston area, and much of it was meant to be humorous or conversational. Some of his medical writings, notably his 1843 essay "The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever", were considered innovative for their time. He was often called upon to issue occasional poetry, or poems written specifically for an event, including many occasions at Harvard. Holmes also popularized several terms, including "Boston Brahmin" and anesthesia. He was the father of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who would become a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States.
Holmes was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on August 29, 1809. His birthplace, a house just north of Harvard Yard, was said to have been the place where the Battle of Bunker Hill was planned. He was the first son of Abiel Holmes, minister of the First Congregational Church and avid historian, and Sarah Wendell, Abiel's second wife. Sarah was the daughter of a wealthy family, and Holmes was named for his maternal grandfather, a judge. The first Wendell, Evert Jansen, left the Netherlands in 1640 and settled in Albany, New York. Also through his mother, Holmes was descended from Massachusetts governor Simon Bradstreet and his wife, Anne Bradstreet (daughter of Thomas Dudley), the first published American poet.
From a young age, Holmes was small and had asthma, but he was known for his precociousness. When he was eight, he took his five-year-old brother, John, to witness the last hanging in Cambridge's Gallows Lot and was subsequently scolded by his parents. He also enjoyed exploring his father's library, writing later in life that "it was very largely theological, so that I was walled in by solemn folios making the shelves bend under the load of sacred learning." After being exposed to poets such as John Dryden, Alexander Pope and Oliver Goldsmith, the young Holmes began to compose and recite his own verse. His first recorded poem, which was copied down by his father, was written when he was 13.
Although a talented student, the young Holmes was often admonished by his teachers for his talkative nature and habit of reading stories during school hours. He studied under Dame Prentiss and William Bigelow before enrolling in what was called the "Port School", a select private academy in the Cambridgeport settlement. One of his schoolmates was future critic and author Margaret Fuller, whose intellect Holmes admired.
Holmes's father sent him to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, at the age of 15. Abiel chose Phillips, which was known for its orthodox Calvinist teachings, because he hoped his eldest son would follow him into the ministry. Holmes had no interest in becoming a theologian, however, and as a result he did not enjoy his single year at Andover. Although he achieved distinction as an elected member of the Social Fraternity, a literary club, he disliked the "bigoted, narrow-minded, uncivilized" attitudes of most of the school's teachers. One teacher in particular, however, noted his young student's talent for poetry, and suggested that he pursue it. Shortly after his sixteenth birthday, Holmes was accepted by Harvard College.
As a member of Harvard's class of 1829, Holmes lived at home for the first few years of his college career rather than in the dormitories. Since he measured only "five feet three inches when standing in a pair of substantial boots", the young student had no interest in joining a sports team or the Harvard Washington Corps. Instead, he allied himself with the "Aristocrats" or "Puffmaniacs", a group of students who gathered in order to smoke and talk. As a town student and the son of a minister, however, he was able to move between social groups. He also became a friend of Charles Chauncy Emerson (brother of Ralph Waldo Emerson), who was a year older. During second year, Holmes was one of 20 students awarded the scholastic honor Deturs, which came with a copy of The Poems of James Graham, John Logan, and William Falconer as a prize. Despite his scholastic achievements, the young scholar admitted to a schoolmate from Andover that he did not "study as hard as I ought to". He did, however, excel in languages and took classes in French, Italian and Spanish.
Holmes's academic interests and hobbies were divided among law, medicine, and writing. He was elected to the Hasty Pudding, where he served as Poet and Secretary, and to the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. With two friends, he collaborated on a small book entitled Poetical Illustrations of the Athenaeum Gallery of Painting, which was a collection of satirical poems about the new art gallery in Boston. He was asked to provide an original work for his graduating class's commencement and wrote a "light and sarcastic" poem that met with great acclaim. Following graduation, Holmes intended to go into the legal profession, so he lived at home and studied at the Harvard Law School (named Dane School at the time). By January 1830, however, he was disenchanted with legal studies. "I am sick at heart of this place and almost everything connected to it", he wrote. "I know not what the temple of law may be to those who have entered it, but to me it seems very cold and cheerless about the threshold."
1830 proved to be an important year for Holmes as a poet; while disappointed by his law studies, he began writing poetry for his own amusement. Before the end of the year, he had produced over fifty poems, contributing twenty-five of them (all unsigned) to The Collegian, a short-lived publication started by friends from Harvard. Four of these poems would ultimately become among his best-known: "The Dorchester Giant", "Reflections of a Proud Pedestrian", "Evening / By a Tailor" and "The Height of the Ridiculous". Nine more of his poems were published anonymously in the 1830 pamphlet Illustrations of the Athenaeum Gallery of Paintings.
In September of that same year, Holmes read a short article in the Boston Daily Advertiser about the 18th-century frigate USS Constitution, which was to be dismantled by the Navy. Holmes was moved to write "Old Ironsides" in opposition to the ship's scrapping. The patriotic poem was published in the Advertiser the very next day and was soon printed by papers in New York, Philadelphia and Washington. It not only brought the author immediate national attention, but the three-stanza poem also generated so much public sentiment that the historic ship was preserved, though plans to do so may have already been in motion.