Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes

by E. E. Brown

"WHAT decided me," says Doctor Holmes, "to give up Law and apply myself to Medicine, I can hardly say, but I had from the first looked upon my law studies as an experiment. At any rate, I made the change, and soon found myself introduced to new scenes and new companionships.

"I can scarcely credit my memory when I recall the first impressions produced upon me by sights afterwards become so familiar that they could no more disturb a pulse-beat than the commonest of every-day experiences. The skeleton, hung aloft like a gibbeted criminal, looked grimly at me as I entered the room devoted to the students of the school I had joined, just as the fleshless figure of Time, with the hour-glass and scythe, used to glare upon me in my childhood from the New England Primer. The white faces in the beds at the Hospital found their reflection in my own cheeks which lost their color as I looked upon them. All this had to pass away in a little time; I had chosen my profession, and must meet all its aspects until they lost their power over my sensibility....

"After attending two courses of lectures in the School of the University, I went to Europe to continue my studies. I can hardly believe my own memory when I recall the old practitioners and professors who were still going round the hospitals when I mingled with the train of students in the École de Médicine."

Of the famous Baron Boyer, author of a nine-volumed book on surgery, Doctor Holmes says, "I never saw him do more than look as if he wanted to cut a good collop out of a patient he was examining." Baron Larrey, the favorite surgeon of Napoleon, he describes as a short, square, substantial man, with iron-gray hair, red face, and white apron. To go round the Hotel des Invalides with Larrey was to live over the campaign of Napoleon, to look on the sun of Austerlitz, to hear the cannon of Marengo, to struggle through the icy waters of the Beresina, to shiver in the snows of the Russian retreat, and to gaze through the battle smoke upon the last charge of the red lancers on the redder field of Waterloo.

Then there was Baron Dupuytren, "ce grand homme de lautre côté de la rivièrè,—with his high, full-doomed head and oracular utterances; Lisfrance, the great drawer of blood and hewer of members; Velpeau, who, coming to Paris in wooden shoes, and starving, almost, at first, raised himself to great eminence as surgeon and author; Broussais, the knotty-featured, savage old man who reminded one of a volcano, which had well-nigh used up its fire and brimstone, and Gabriel Audral, the rapid, fluent, fervid and imaginative speaker.

"The object of our reverence, however, I might almost say idolatry," adds Doctor Holmes, "was Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis, a tall, rather spare, dignified personage, of serene and grave aspect, but with a pleasant smile and kindly voice for the student with whom he came into personal relations.

"If I summed up the lessons of Louis in two expressions, they would be these: First, always make sure that you form a distinct and clear idea of the matter you are considering. Second, always avoid vague approximations where exact estimates are possible....

"Yes, as I say, I look back on the long hours of the many days I spent in the wards and in the autopsy room of La Pitié, where Louis was one of the attending physicians—yes, Louis did a great work for practical medicine. Modest in the presence of nature, fearless in the face of authority, unwearying in the pursuit of truth, he was a man whom any student might be happy and proud to claim as his teacher and his friend. And yet, as I look back on the days when I followed his teachings, I feel that I gave myself up too exclusively to his methods of thought and study. There is one part of their business that certain medical practitioners are too apt to forget; namely, that what they should most of all try to do is to ward off disease, to alleviate suffering, to preserve life, or at least to prolong it if possible. It is not of the slightest interest to the patient to know whether three or three and a quarter inches of his lungs are hepatized. His mind is not occupied with thinking of the curious problems which are to be solved by his own autopsy, whether this or that strand of the spinal marrow is the seat of this or that form of degeneration. He wants something to relieve his pain, to mitigate the anguish of dyspnæa, to bring back motion and sensibility to the dead limb, to still the tortures of neuralgia. What is it to him that you can localize and name by some uncouth term, the disease which you could not prevent and which you can not cure? an old woman who knows how to make a poultice and how to put it on, and does it tuto, cito, jucunde, just when and where it is wanted, is better—a thousand times better in many cases—than a staring pathologist who explores and thumps and doubts and guesses and tells his patient he will be better to-morrow, and so goes home to tumble his books over and make out a diagnosis.

"But in those days I, like most of my fellow students, was thinking much more of 'science' than of practical medicine, and I believe if we had not clung so closely to the skirts of Louis, and had followed some of the courses of men like Rousseau,—therapeutists, who gave special attention to curative methods, and not chiefly to diagnosis—it would have been better for me and others. One thing, at any rate, we did learn in the wards of Louis. We learned that a very large proportion of diseases get well of themselves, without any special medication—the great fact formulated, enforced and popularized by Doctor Jacob Bigelow."