Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes

by E. E. Brown

"Nor are older persons always so thoughtful and serious in the presence of mortality as it might be supposed they would show themselves. Some of us have encountered Congressional committees attending the remains of distinguished functionaries to their distant place of burial. They generally bore up well under their bereavement. One might have expected to find them gathered in silent groups in the parlors of the Continental Hotel or the Brevoort House; to meet the grief-stricken members of the party smileless and sobbing as they sadly paced the corridors of Parker's, before they set off in a mournful and weeping procession. It was not so; Candor would have to confess that it was far otherwise; Charity would suggest that Curiosity should withdraw her eye from the key-hole; Humanity would try to excuse what she could not help witnessing; and a tear would fall from the blind eye of oblivion and blot out their hotel bills forever.

"You need not be surprised, then, if among this large number of young men there should have been now and then something to find fault with. Twice in the course of thirty-five years I have had occasion to rebuke the acts of individual students, once in the presence of the whole class on the human and manly sympathy of which I could always safely rely. I have been in the habit of considering myself at liberty to visit the department I am speaking of, though it had its own officers; I took a part in drawing up the original regulations which governed the methods of work; I have often found fault with individuals or small classes for a want of method and neatness which is too common in all such places. But in the face of all peccadilloes and of the idle and baseless stories which have been circulated, I will say, as if from the chair I no longer occupy, that the management of the difficult, delicate and all important branch committed to the care of a succession of laborious and conscientious demonstrators, as I have known it through more than the third of a century, has been discreet, humane, faithful, and that the record of that department is most honorable to them and to the classes they have instructed.

"But there are better things to think of and to speak of than the false and foolish stories to which we have been forced to listen. While the pitiable attempt has been making to excite the feelings of the ignorant against the school of the university, hundreds of sufferers throughout Christendom—throughout civilization—have been blessing the name of Boston and the Harvard Medical School as the source from which relief has reached them for one of the gravest injuries, and for one of the most distressing of human maladies. I witnessed many of the experiments by which the great surgeon who lately filled a chair in Harvard University, has made the world his debtor. Those poor remains of mortality of which we have heard so much, have been of more service to the human race than the souls once within them ever dreamed of conferring. Doctor Bigelow's repeated and searching investigations into the anatomy of the hip joint showed him the band which formed the chief difficulty in reducing dislocations of the thigh. What Sir Astley Cooper and all the surgeons after him had failed to see, Doctor Bigelow detected. New rules for reduction of the dislocation were the consequence, and the terrible pulleys disappeared from the operating amphitheatre.

"Still more remarkable are the results obtained by Doctor Bigelow in the saving of life and the lessening of suffering in the new method of operation for calculus. By the testimony of those renowned surgeons, Sir Henry Thompson and Mr. Erichsen, by the award to Doctor Bigelow of a sexennial prize founded by the Marquis d' Argenteuil, and by general consent, this innovation is established as one of the great modern improvements in surgery. I saw the numerous and patient experiments by which that priceless improvement was effected, and I cannot stop to moan over a scrap of integument, said to have been made imperishable, when I remember that for every lifeless body which served for these experiments, a hundred died or a thousand living fellow creatures have been saved from unutterable anguish, and many of them from premature death.

"You will visit the noble hall soon to be filled with the collections left by the late Professor John Collins Warren, added to by other contributors, and to the care and increase of which the late Doctor John Jackson of precious memory gave many years of his always useful and laborious life. You may expect to find there a perfect Golgotha of skulls and a platoon of skeletons open to the sight of all comers. You will find portions of every human organ. You will see bones softened by acid and tied in bowknots; other bones burned until they are light as cork and whiter than ivory, yet still keeping their form; you will see sets of teeth from the stage of infancy to that of old age, and in every intermediate condition, exquisitely prepared and mounted; you will see preparations that once formed portions of living beings now carefully preserved to show their vessels and nerves; the organ of hearing exquisitely carved by French artists; you will find specimens of human integument, showing its constituent parts in different races; among the rest, that of the Ethiopian, with its cuticle or false skin turned back to show that God gave him a true skin beneath it as white as our own. Some of these specimens are injected to show their blood vessels; some are preserved in alcohol; some are dried. There was formerly a small scrap, said to be human skin, which had been subjected to the tanning process, and which was not the least interesting of the series. I have not seen it for a good while, and it may have disappeared as the cases might happen to be open while unscrupulous strangers were strolling through the museum. If it has, the curator will probably ask the next poor fellow who has his leg cut off, for permission to have a portion of its integument turned into leather. He would not object, in all probability, especially if he were promised that a wallet for his pocket or a slipper for his remaining foot, should be made from it.

"There is no use in quarrelling with the specimens in a museum because so many of them once formed a part of human beings. The British Government paid fifteen thousand pounds for the collection made by John Hunter, which is full of such relics. The Huntarian Museum is still a source of pride to every educated citizen in London. Our foreign visitors have already learned that the Warren Anatomical Museum is one of the sights worth seeing during their stay among us. Charles Dickens was greatly interested in looking through its treasures, and that intelligent and indefatigable hard worker, the Emperor of Brazil, inspected its wonders with as much curiosity as if he had been a professor of anatomy. May it ever remain sacred from harm in the noble hall of which it is about taking possession. If violence, excited by false outcries, shall ever assail the treasure-house of anthropology, we may tremble lest its next victim shall be the home of art, and ignorant passions once aroused, the archives that hold the wealth of literature perish in a new Alexandrian conflagration. This is not a novel source of apprehension to the thoughtful. Education, religious, moral, intellectual, is the only safeguard against so fearful a future.

"To one of the great interests of society, the education of those who are to be the guardians of its health, the stately edifice which opens its doors to us for the first time to-day is devoted. It is a lasting record of the spirit and confidence of the young men of the medical profession, who led their elders in the brave enterprise, an enduring proof of the liberality of the citizens of Boston and of friends beyond our narrow boundaries, a monument to the memory of those who, a hundred years ago, added a school of medicine to our honored, cherished, revered university, and to all who have helped to sustain its usefulness and dignity through the century just completed.

"It stands solid and four square among the structures which are the pride of our New England Venice—our beautiful metropolis, won by well-directed toil from the marshes and creeks and lagoons which were our inheritance from nature. The magnificent churches around it let in the sunshine through windows stained with the pictured legends of antiquity. The student of nature is content with the white rays that show her just as she is; and if ever a building was full of light—light from the north and the south; light from the east and the west; light from above, which the great concave mirror of sky pours down into it—this is such an edifice. The halls where Art teaches its lessons and those where the sister Sciences store their collections, the galleries that display the treasures of painting, and sculpture, are close enough for agreeable companionship. It is probable that in due time the Public Library, with its vast accumulations, will be next door neighbor to the new domicile of our old and venerated institution. And over all this region rise the tall landmarks which tell the dwellers in our streets and the traveller as he approaches that in the home of Science, Arts, and Letters, the God of our Fathers is never forgotten, but that high above these shrines of earthly knowledge and beauty, are lifted the towers and spires which are the symbols of human aspiration ever looking up to Him, the Eternal, Immortal, Invisible."

At the conclusion of this noble address, the portrait of Professor Oliver Wendell Holmes was presented to the Medical School by Doctor Minot, in the happily-chosen words that follow:

"Many alumni of the school, together with some of its present students, have desired that a permanent memorial of their beloved teacher, Professor Oliver Wendell Holmes, should be placed in the new college building, in token of their gratitude for the great services which he has rendered to many generations of his pupils. By his eminent scientific attainments, his sound method of teaching, his felicity of illustration, and his untiring devotion to all the duties of his chair, he inspired those who were so fortunate as to come under his instruction with the importance of a thorough knowledge of anatomy, the foundation of medical science. In the name of the alumni and students of this college, I have the pleasure of presenting to the medical faculty a portrait of Professor Holmes, painted by Mr. Alexander, to be placed in the college in remembrance of his invaluable services to Harvard University, to the medical profession and to the community."