Oliver Wendell Holmes
Physician, lecturer, novelist, inventor, historian, anatomist, humorist—and poet, professor, and autocrat of the breakfast-table—Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) has been called “the most successful combination which the world has ever seen of the physician and man of letters.” In April 1883, after his retirement from teaching at Harvard Medical School, Holmes was the honored guest at a banquet hosted by the physicians of New York City. The motif for the banquet was a crossed scalpel and pen to represent Holmes’ facility in both literature and medicine. As Dr. Andrew H. Smith commented, Holmes was “skilled to dissect with knife or pen, his subjects dead or living men.” This exhibit, The Scalpel and the Pen, takes its name from that idea and explores all the different sides of the personal and professional career, in both literature and medicine, of this true Boston original.