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Annie Fields was the wife of James T. Fields, the publisher of The Atlantic monthly, and a close friend of Holmes. Here, in this letter to novelist Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909), she describes a visit with Holmes who speaks of his reverence for the…

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., abandoned his studies at Harvard College to join the Massachusetts Volunteers at the outbreak of the Civil War. He was wounded on October 21, 1861, at the battle of Ball’s Bluff, in Virginia, and attended by a…

Despite Harvard’s renowned faculty members and array of courses, the students themselves in the mid-19th century were often poorly trained. Few of the matriculants had formal college degrees upon entering the school, the required course of…

As part of his dedicatory address at the Boston Medical Library, Holmes praised, in particular, the development of periodical indexes. “This idea has long been working in the minds of scholars, and all who have had occasion to follow out any…

A watercolor illustration that accompanied an 1890 version of Oliver Wendell Holmes' (1809-1894) The autocrat of the breakfast-table

The famous "Atlantic Breakfast," given by the publishers of The Atlantic monthly on December 3, to honor Holmes at 70 and his contributions to the success of the magazine, was covered in local newspapers. Guests at the event included literary figures…