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MEDICAL HISTORY Previous Volume 361:846-847 August 27, 2009 Number 9 Next

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This week marks the bicentennial of the birth of Oliver Wendell Holmes (August 29, 1809–October 7, 1894), who at various times during the 19th century was America's best-known physician and best-selling author. His essay on the contagiousness of puerperal fever (1843), which prefigured the germ theory by two decades, constitutes his strongest claim to medical immortality. He also introduced microscopy to North American medical students, championed bedside teaching, coined the terms "anesthesia" and "anesthetic agents," named tuberculosis "the white plague," and critiqued his era's therapies, from bloodletting to homeopathy. His "Breakfast-Table" series for the Atlantic Monthly (a periodical that he . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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From Providence Hospitals and the University of South Carolina, both in Columbia (C.S.B.); and Harvard Medical School and the Center for the History of Medicine, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine — both in Boston (S.H.P.).

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