Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809 to 1894) was an American physician, poet and polymath based in Boston. After studying law briefly and then training at the medical schools of Paris, he received his Doctor of Medicine degree from Harvard Medical School in 1836, taught at Dartmouth Medical School, and in 1847 became Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Harvard, where he served as dean until 1853 and taught until 1882. He was an advocate of medical reform and, in his 1843 essay The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever, posited the then controversial idea that doctors could carry puerperal fever from patient to patient, a work now considered a landmark in the germ theory of disease. Alongside this he was one of the best known writers of his day, grouped among the fireside poets and author of the Breakfast-Table series that began with The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. This entry records what he held and what was disputed; it is not medical advice.