Career at Harvard Medical School
Holmes had a life-long association with Harvard and devoted most of his career to its medical school. After some years on the faculty of the Tremont Street Medical School and a brief appointment in anatomy and physiology at Dartmouth, he returned to Harvard in 1847, accepting the Parkman Professorship of Anatomy and Physiology, following the retirement of John Collins Warren. Holmes proved an enthusiastic and popular lecturer, and his classes were inevitably scheduled in the afternoons. As David W. Cheever recalled, "One o'clock was always assigned to Dr. Holmes because he alone could hold his exhausted audience's attention. As a lecturer he was accurate, punctual, precise, unvarying in patience over detail, and though not an original anatomist in the sense of a discoverer, yet a most exact descriptive lecturer; while the wealth of illustration, comparison, and simile he used was unequalled."
Holmes would hold the Parkman Professorship for over 35 years, until his own retirement in 1882. Of his teaching, he said, "While many of the sciences have so changed that the teachers of the past would hardly know them, it has not been so with the branch I teach… General anatomy, or histology, on the other hand, is almost all new; it has grown up, mainly, since I began my medical studies…. If I myself needed an apology for holding my office so long, I should find it in the fact that human anatomy is much the same study that it was in the days of Vesalius and Fallopius, and that a greater part of my teaching was of such a nature that it could never become antiquated."
In addition to his teaching duties, Holmes held office as the Dean of Harvard Medical School from 1847 to 1853, and presided over one of the most tumultuous periods in the institution’s history, as the move to North Grove Street and the acquisition of the Warren Anatomical Museum in 1847 were followed closely by the murder of George Parkman in 1849 and the trial of John White Webster and the debates over the admission of black students and women in 1850.