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 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Dean Howells, Sarah Orne Jewett, and John Greenleaf Whittier, along with Harvard's president, Charles W. Eliot. Holmes later wrote to Howells, "You showed, I thought, great tact, and savoir dire and faire in your management of the south pole of the festival. Of course I was pleased—how could I help being pleased—with the penetrating and nicely accented praise you awarded me…. I hope you will live to see your septuagenarian breakfast and many a breakfast on the other side of it, not only famous, but happy in all that surrounds you.”]]> Daily graphic on December 6, 1879]]> The autocrat of the breakfast-table]]> The autocrat of the breakfast-table]]> “This idea has long been working in the minds of scholars, and all who have had occasion to follow out any special subject. I have a right to speak of it, for I long ago attempted to supply the want of indexes in some small measure for my own need. I had a very complete set of the ‘American Journal of the Medical Sciences’; an entire set of the ‘North American Review,’ and many volumes of the reprints of the three leading British quarterlies. Of what use were they to me without general indexes? I looked them all through carefully and made classified lists of all the articles I thought I should most care to read. But they soon outgrew my lists…. Nothing, therefore, could be more pleasing to me than to see the attention which has been given of late years to the great work of indexing.” This notebook of Holmes almost certainly contains the classified lists he mentions, with references to articles on anatomy, pathology, surgery, midwifery, chemistry, and therapeutics.]]> to the Library of Harvard Medical School, 1956
]]> "Our new President, Eliot, has turned the whole University over like a flapjack. There never was such a bouleversement as that in our Medical Faculty." This manuscript essay by Holmes, expressing his cautious views on the Eliot reforms (“I am ready for a step onward, perhaps for a stride, but not quite ready for a leap,”) was probably one presented to the Medical Faculty at its meeting on March 16, 1871, when the new plan of instruction was being debated.]]> “those two new button-holes in his congenital waistcoat.”]]> 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 late Henry Jacob Bigelow and recalls the formation of The Atlantic and his early literary career and experiences on the lecture circuit. “In 1857 Lowell wrote me that a magazine was to be started in Boston and if I would write for it he would edit it. I thought that a great compliment of course but it seemed to me he was out of his head—but as it proved he showed great discernment because without vanity I may say I helped to make the magazine a success and to sustain it.”]]>