Thomas Dwight, Instructor in Topographical Anatomy and Histology, made these sections of a three-year-old child for use in his lectures at the Medical School in 1880-1881 and were some of the first frozen sections in use in this country. The plates are life-size. As part of the preface, Dwight includes his directions for making such specimens.

First, be very sure that the body, or part, to be frozen is in precisely the position you desire, and that there are no folds or indentations in the skin. I always use natural cold when possible. Weather much about zero (Fahrenheit) is unsatisfactory; but if the part is thoroughly chilled by several days' exposure to a pretty low temperature, a night of 10? may possibly finish it. Salt and ice, or snow, no doubt, will answer the purpose, but much time and patience are required

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Frozen sections of a child; fifteen drawings from nature, by H. P. Quincy, written by Thomas Dwight]]>
With dissections by Henry Gray, lecturer on anatomy, and H. V. Carter, demonstrator of anatomy at Saint George's Hospital, London, Gray's Anatomy quickly became a standard text for medical students. It first appeared in the U.S. in 1859 and became required reading for first-year students at Harvard as early as 1861. The fortieth edition appeared in 2008, 150 years after its first publication.

This copy of the first edition was in the library of Oliver Wendell Holmes.

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Anatomy]]>
Richard M. Hodges held the position of Demonstrator of Anatomy under Oliver Wendell Holmes from 1853 to 1861. He published this manual on human dissection for the student in 1858, then revised it thoroughly and reprinted it, as here, in 1867.

This is a presentation copy from Hodges to Oliver Wendell Holmes; a photograph of Hodges at work, labelled "Richard M. Hodges, M.D., princeps sectorum" has been inserted on the front flyleaf.

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Practical Dissections]]>

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Here among the entries for items of mechanical dentistry are specimens 1562 and 1565]]> ]]> ]]> ]]> ]]> ]]> ]]> ]]> ]]>
Back of wooden base has red diagram showing origin and distribution of intercostal arteries. ]]>
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]]> ]]> ]]> An answer to the homeopathic delusions]]> Homoeopathy, a response to Oliver Wendell Holmes' (1809-1894) lecture on homeopathy]]> ]]> ]]> “skilled to dissect with both.” Dr. Fordyce Barker, president of the New York Academy of Medicine, was the honorary chairman of the event, and notable figures among the two hundred guests included Drs. Alonzo Clark, S. Weir Mitchell, Austin Flint, John Shaw Billings, Henry Jacob Bigelow, Samuel D. Gross, and William Pepper. In response to the toasts and speeches, Holmes delivered a 2,000 word poem.]]> Over the teacups (1891), Holmes’ late collection of essays and poems following in the vein of The autocrat of the breakfast-table. This copy of the first edition bears an author’s presentation inscription to Dr. James Read Chadwick of the Boston Medical Library, dated November 9, 1890, the day immediately after its first publication.]]> Over the teacups by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)]]> ]]> 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.”]]> “those two new button-holes in his congenital waistcoat.”]]> “How far are the external means of exploring the condition of internal organs to be considered useful and important in medical practice?”The essay makes frequent reference to the lectures and clinical demonstrations of P. C. A. Louis which Holmes had recently attended in Paris. This copy was presented by Holmes to his mentor, Dr. James Jackson (1777-1867).

Holmes was also awarded two Boylston Prizes in 1837 for separate essays on neuralgia and intermittent fever in New England.

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to the Library of Harvard Medical School, 1956]]>
]]> “How far are the external means of exploring the condition of internal organs to be considered useful and important in medical practice?”The essay makes frequent reference to the lectures and clinical demonstrations of P. C. A. Louis which Holmes had recently attended in Paris. This copy was presented by Holmes to his mentor, Dr. James Jackson (1777-1867).

Holmes was also awarded two Boylston Prizes in 1837 for separate essays on neuralgia and intermittent fever in New England.

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Dissertations on the question “How far are the external means of exploring the condition of internal organs to be considered useful and important in medical practice?”]]> here through the Google Books]]>
]]> "I can truly say that the limited time and attention, which the hurry so apt to attend the close of lectures has allowed me, render me very diffident in approaching the subject at all, and especially so in the presence of one who, however lenient in his judgment, could hardly avoid seeing the imperfections which must attend my brief glance at the subject."In 1849, Warren had taken possession of the Boston Phrenological Society's collection of casts and skulls, including the skull of Johann Gaspar Spurzheim. That collection now resides with the Warren Anatomical Museum.

By 1861, however, Holmes’ views on phrenology were set. He said, “I am not one of its haters; on the contrary, I am grateful for the incidental good it has done…. Yet I should not have devoted so many words to it, did I not recognize the light it has thrown on human actions by its study of congenital organic tendencies. Its maps of the surface of the head are, I feel sure, founded on a delusion, but its studies of individual character are always interesting and instructive.”

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"rapidly, for circumstances obliged me to prepare it entirely in the space of little more than three days; imperfectly, for I had only the resources of my own library and notes, and had scarcely time to analyse any cases besides those I had reduced to the tabular form two years before."]]> A dissertation on acute pericarditis]]> ]]> “works which we are in the habit of considering as being outside of the pale of medical science,” particularly Thomsonian and homeopathic literature.]]> Trials of a public benefactor attempts to provide support for his claim to precedence in the discovery of ether anesthesia. Here, as part of the story, Oliver Wendell Holmes coins the term in a letter to Morton written on November 21, 1846, shortly after the first public demonstrations at Massachusetts General Hospital. Holmes wrote, ]]> Trials of a public benefactor, as illustrated in the discovery of etherization by Nathan P. Rice in which Oliver Wendell Holmes coins the term "anesthesia"]]> here through the Medical Heritage Library]]> A mortal antipathy : first opening of the new portfolio. After Holmes’ death, his friend and fellow novelist William Dean Howells (1837-1920) said of Holmes' work, “His novels all belonged to an order of romance which was as distinctly his own as the form of dramatized essay which he invented in the Autocrat. If he did not think poorly of them, he certainly did not think too proudly, and I heard him quote with relish the phrase of a lady who had spoken of them to him as his ‘medicated novels.’ That, indeed, was perhaps what they were; a faint, faint odor of the pharmacopoeia clung to their pages; their magic was scientific. He knew this better than any one else, of course, and if any one had said it in his turn he would hardly have minded it. But what he did mind was the persistent misinterpretation of his intention in certain quarters where he thought he had the right to respectful criticism in stead of the succession of sneers that greeted the successive numbers of his story; and it was no secret that he felt the persecution keenly.”]]> A mortal antipathy : first opening of the new portfolio by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)]]> The Guardian Angel. After Holmes’ death, his friend and fellow novelist William Dean Howells (1837-1920) said of Holmes' work, “His novels all belonged to an order of romance which was as distinctly his own as the form of dramatized essay which he invented in the Autocrat. If he did not think poorly of them, he certainly did not think too proudly, and I heard him quote with relish the phrase of a lady who had spoken of them to him as his ‘medicated novels.’ That, indeed, was perhaps what they were; a faint, faint odor of the pharmacopoeia clung to their pages; their magic was scientific. He knew this better than any one else, of course, and if any one had said it in his turn he would hardly have minded it. But what he did mind was the persistent misinterpretation of his intention in certain quarters where he thought he had the right to respectful criticism in stead of the succession of sneers that greeted the successive numbers of his story; and it was no secret that he felt the persecution keenly.”]]> The guardian angel by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)]]> Elsie Venner. This is a presentation copy from Holmes to Henry Jacob Bigelow (1818-1890). After Holmes’ death, his friend and fellow novelist William Dean Howells (1837-1920) said of Holmes' work, “His novels all belonged to an order of romance which was as distinctly his own as the form of dramatized essay which he invented in the Autocrat. If he did not think poorly of them, he certainly did not think too proudly, and I heard him quote with relish the phrase of a lady who had spoken of them to him as his ‘medicated novels.’ That, indeed, was perhaps what they were; a faint, faint odor of the pharmacopoeia clung to their pages; their magic was scientific. He knew this better than any one else, of course, and if any one had said it in his turn he would hardly have minded it. But what he did mind was the persistent misinterpretation of his intention in certain quarters where he thought he had the right to respectful criticism in stead of the succession of sneers that greeted the successive numbers of his story; and it was no secret that he felt the persecution keenly.”]]> Elsie Venner by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)]]> ]]> “Whatever we may think of Dr. Stafford’s practice, it is not certain that his patients would all have done better under the treatment of the present day. Some differences there would certainly be in our favor…. But slight cases of disease would commonly get well under his treatment, and severe ones often die under ours…. Though some of his prescriptions may cause us to smile or shudder, it would be well if a physician of our time, whose prescriptions should be exhumed in the year 2080, were able to stand the examination of posterity as creditably as the very respectable Dr. Stafford.”]]> Medical directions written for Governor Winthrop by Edward Stafford, of London, in 1643, with notes by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)]]> ]]> "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.]]> “the strange magic of the enchanted goblet”—the first administration of ether anesthesia in operative surgery just a year before: “The knife is searching for disease, the pulleys are dragging back dislocated limbs, nature herself is working out the primal curse which doomed the tenderest of her creatures to the sharpest of her trials, but the fierce extremity of suffering has been steeped in the waters of forgetfulness, and the deepest furrow in the knotted brow of agony has been smoothed forever.”

The lecture prompted The Boston medical and surgical journal to aver that “it is the best discourse ever delivered in the Medical School of Harvard University. It abounds with bright thoughts, and there is a kind of elasticity and vigor running through its pages, that refreshes the reader.”

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"not by ridicule, but by argument; perhaps with great freedom, but with good temper and in peaceable language; with very little hope of reclaiming converts, with no desire of making enemies, but with a firm belief that its pretensions and assertions cannot stand before a single hour of calm investigation," the lecture ignited a war of words in newspapers and pamphlets.]]> Homœópathy, and its kindred delusions by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)]]> “I considered the task more than difficult…. The difference in the estimate of his writings is so great that any analysis of them with comments, interpretations, judgments, must fail to satisfy some, must exceed the estimate of others. I tried to be fair; I endeavored to follow as well as I might the course of Emerson’s thoughts and to reach as far as in me lay the inner nature of the man. On the whole I have been satisfied with the verdicts passed upon my book.”]]> The collegian, some of Oliver Wendell Holmes's (1809-1894) poems then appeared in Illustrations of the Athenæum gallery of paintings (1830) and The harbinger : a may-gift (1833). Holmes’ Poems (1836) represents the first collected edition of his work.]]> Poems by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)]]> The collegian, from February through July, 1830. Some of his poems then appeared in Illustrations of the Athenæum gallery of paintings (1830) and The harbinger : a may-gift (1833). Holmes’ Poems (1836) represents the first collected edition of his work.]]> The Collegian, a Harvard undergraduate student magazine]]> “asked the opinion of the Society as to the contagion of puerperal fever and the probability of physicians communicating it from one patient to another.” Holmes proceeded to research the matter through case reports and medical literature at the Boston Athenaeum and delivered his findings at this meeting of the Society.]]> Puerperal fever, as a private pestilence, containing a lengthy introduction and additional cases and evidence to support the initial assertions. Holmes stated that the original journal “never obtained a large circulation, and ceased to be published after a year’s existence, and as the few copies I had struck off separately were soon lost sight of among the friends to whom they were sent, the Essay can hardly be said to have been fully brought before the Profession.” The copy displayed here, with a presentation inscription to Henry Jacob Bigelow, contains marginal annotations, corrections, and notes by Holmes.]]> “He can tell you much that is interesting. Do not mind his apparent frivolity and you will soon find that he is intelligent and well-informed. He has the true zeal."

Two volumes of Holmes’ notes on Jackson’s lectures have survived. Here, on November 15, 1832, Jackson comments on the fever and death of phrenologist Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, who had been lecturing in Boston and died five days earlier. Jackson had attended Spurzheim at his death, and John Collins Warren performed the autopsy.

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Lectures on the theory and practice of medicine ]]> to the Library of Harvard Medical School, 1956
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Memoranda of patients and cases treated]]> to the Library of Harvard Medical School, 1956
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The Atlantic monthly and also as part of a program for a prize-giving ceremony at the Boston Latin School on May 25, 1861, just a few weeks after Confederate forces began firing on Fort Sumter. Many handbill printings of the hymn followed, including this one from New York.]]> The army hymn, no. 2. Air : old hundred by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)]]> The Atlantic monthly. Here, he describes some of the aftermath of the battle which he observed.]]> Atlantic monthly, v. 10 no. 62]]> “I have more fully learned at least three principles since I have been in Paris: not to take authority when I can have facts; not to guess when I can know; not to think a man must take physic because he is sick …. Many a long and wearying hour I have passed on the stone floor of the autopsy-room at La Pitié, wasting my time over little points which, a few years later, would have been easily settled by the microscope …. As for the science of England and France, or rather Paris and London—to judge by their books and their students, and the reports of the intelligent young men who have seen both, the Frenchmen have half a century in advance.”]]> to the Library of Harvard Medical School, 1956
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“The bedside is always the true center of medical teaching. Certain branches must be taught in the lecture-room, and will necessarily involve a good deal that is not directly useful to the future practitioner. But the over ambitious and active student must not be led away by the seduction of knowledge for its own sake from his principal pursuit. The humble beginner, who is alarmed at the vast fields of knowledge opened to him, may be encouraged by the assurance that with a very slender provision of science, in distinction from practical skill, he may be a useful and acceptable member of the profession to which the health of the community is entrusted.”]]> Teaching from the chair and at the bedside : an introductory lecture delivered before the Medical Class of Harvard University, November 6, 1867]]> “his habits of study good & his talents most promising”). Snowden’s fees were assumed by the Colonization Society.

Laing, Snowden and a third student, Martin Robison Delany, enrolled during the winter term in 1850 but were forced to withdraw following a protest by some of the Medical School students. Both Laing and Snowden went on to pursue medical studies at Dartmouth.

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Laing, Snowden and a third student, Martin Robison Delany, enrolled during the winter term in 1850 but were forced to withdraw following a protest by some of the Medical School students. Both Laing and Snowden went on to pursue medical studies at Dartmouth.

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“The transitions from the grave to gay were very happy, and kept the audience in a state of alternate gravity and mirth. The imagery and descriptive portions of the poem—particularly those relating to rural scenes—were exceedingly beautiful and poetical, and I am confident, if it should be given to the public, that it will be pronounced one of the most beautiful metrical performances that has ever emanated from the pen of an American writer.”]]> of the Massachusetts Medical Society
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“I have not hesitated to emphasize those specially belonging to the medical profession. I owe to my friends the physicians so much more than the practice of medicine owes to me that I feel at liberty to praise their calling without reserve, but no more than I think its due.”]]>
Medical Improvement
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“I thank you for them. They are curious, interesting—and fearfully truthful. I do not think much is gained in this instance by the multiple process. I like best the single photograph. That certainly looks like me, and is not to blame for not being more attractive…. but if [Henry Pickering] Bowditch has any curiosity for one of the compound ones, you can let him have it, and welcome.”]]> "These will be given by Dr. Holmes, weekly, through the Spring months…. They will illustrate by recent specimens, and a large number of carefully selected English and French preparations, the leading facts of animal and vegetable structure and development, and will be enforced by practical tests of the students' knowledge."]]> and transferred to the Library of Harvard Medical School
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“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
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Border lines of knowledge, in some provinces of medical science is a published and somewhat expanded version of Holmes’ introductory lecture to the students at Harvard Medical School at the opening of term on November 6, 1861. Although he refers to human anatomy as “an almost exhausted science,” Holmes goes on to list some of his own anatomical observations:

“The nucleated cells found connected with the cancellated structure of the bones, which I first pointed out and had figured in 1847, and have shown yearly from that time to the present, and fossa masseterica, a shallow concavity on the ramus muscle, which acquires significance when examined by the side of the deep cavity on the corresponding part in some carnivore to which it answers, may perhaps be claimed as deserving attention."

Holmes continues, commenting on the discovery of this artifact, as he notes how:

"I have also pleased myself by making a special group of the six radiating muscles which diverge from the spine of the axis, or second cervical vertebra, and by giving to it the name stella musculosa nuchæ. But this scanty catalogue is only an evidence that one may teach long and see little that has not been noted by those who have gone before him.”
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stella musculosa nuchae (“muscular star of the neck”).]]> stella musculosa nuchae. Holmes donated this mount in 1868 to the Warren Anatomical Museum.]]>
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“the necessary sittings were irksome to the subject.” After Holmes’ death, the City of Boston commissioned a bust to be made, and Bartlett secured the work for one of his former students, Richard Edwin Brooks (1865-1919), and passed over to him the glass negatives of the photographs. The original bronze bust was sculpted in Paris by Brooks in 1896 and presented to the Boston Public Library; a copy was made for the Boston Medical Library and placed in Holmes Hall.]]> The autocrat of the breakfast-table]]> The autocrat of the breakfast-table]]> “skilled to dissect with both.” Dr. Fordyce Barker, president of the New York Academy of Medicine, was the honorary chairman of the event, and notable figures among the two hundred guests included Drs. Alonzo Clark, S. Weir Mitchell, Austin Flint, John Shaw Billings, Henry Jacob Bigelow, Samuel D. Gross, and William Pepper. In response to the toasts and speeches, Holmes delivered a 2,000 word poem.]]> “My three months’ experience of the Health Lift has been entirely satisfactory. It furnishes a concentrated form of exercise which I have found salutary, agreeable and exhilarating. It calls the blood into the muscles and leaves them ready for further action, so that I have found myself more disposed to take a long walk after four or five lifts than before. I may add that the particular apparatus used at your rooms, ‘The Reactionary Lifter,’ is a most ingenious, convenient, compact and serviceable arrangement, by which the lifter’s own weight is made to do service, and by an easy and simple adjustment of leverage, to furnish a resistance to be overcome, all the way from 20 to 1000 pounds and more.”]]> ]]> The new century and the new building of the Harvard Medical School, 1783-1883. Addresses and exercises at the one hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the Medical School of Harvard University, October 17, 1883 showing Harvard Medical School in 1883]]> “I was very glad to have somebody get profit and pleasure from my contrivance, and made him quite welcome to whatever there was to be gained by its manufacture…. From his establishment have come certain improvements of much value, particularly the sliding arrangement for adjusting the focus, in place of the original slots, or narrow grooves, and the method of holding the pictures.”

The Wheeler and Bazin-type folding stereoscope, with its own sliding focus, was patented in 1863. The stereographic view displayed here belonged to Holmes who mentions it in a letter to Mrs. Asa Gray, in 1871: “I have stereographs of the Boston Elm, before its present condition of decadence, and one of the Washington Elm, the last a fair specimen of the tree….”

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]]> John McNab later went on to be president of the White Mountain Medical Society and the New Hampshire Medical Society.

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The Manchester tragedy : a sketch of the life and death of Miss Sarah H. Furber, and the trial of her seducer and murderer ]]>
The Boston Medical Library copy was certainly in the library by 1900; incised “Richard E. Brooks, Paris, 1896” on side, and was possibly a gift of James Read Chadwick.

A photographic series of studies was made of Holmes “aet. 75,” or circa 1884. According to the BMSJ (1894), v. 131, p. 376, “The portrait of Dr. Holmes which we publish this week is at once an excellent likeness and a very pleasing picture of him in his later years—for us by far the most so of any which we know. The photograph was taken by the Boston sculptor, Bartlett, with a view to making a bust. The design was given up, as the necessary sittings were irksome to the subject, and we are indebted to Mr. Bartlett and Dr. J. R. Chadwick for the right to the picture. It was not easy for the painter’s brush or the sculptor’s chisel to do justice to Dr. Holmes’s mobile features.”

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Dr. David Humphreys Storer, 1900
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"Take it that way; that does not show the old man’s wrinkles, does it?" ]]> “a case of justifiable domicide,” it was demolished in 1883.]]> The autocrat of the breakfast-table. The essays were originally printed in issues of The Atlantic monthly, beginning in November 1857; this is a first edition of their appearance in book form. Three separate impressions of The autocrat were printed between November 12 and December 7, 1858, and, reputedly, some 20,000 copies sold during that period—half of them during the first three days following publication. The passage displayed here reprints Holmes’ own favorite of his poems, “The chambered nautilus.”]]> The autocrat of the breakfast-table, by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)]]> “It is there; the age is there; the wrinkles are there. It is a likeness. It is the portrait of an old man, dew-lap and all.” He later wrote, “I consider Mr. Billings’ portrait of myself an excellent likeness and so far as I can judge a good painting. I have had many pictures and photographs taken, but it seems to me that no one of them has been so satisfactory as this.”]]> 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 scene was most impressive as the whole audience arose on his entrance. A member of the first class stepped forward, and in a few words, carefully prepared but rather tremulously delivered, presented a silver loving-cup as a gift of the class and expressed their regret at the separation. Dr. Holmes was so surprised and affected that for once his readiness failed him. He could but utter a few disconnected sentences of thanks, and say that lest his feelings should overcome him, it were better he should keep to the lecture he had written.”]]> to the Library of Harvard Medical School
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"too gorgeous—too grand—for such a humble literary work-bench…. The riddle on it is one of the best in the English language. I doubt if there are ten, or even five—I am not sure there are three which can compare with it in finish and in the perfection of its graceful double-meanings…. If you meant it for me, I can only say I thank you most heartily for a gift of which any author might be proud, engraved with lines which he will never look upon without wishing he had written them."]]> Ballou’s pictorial for June 20th and depicts the finish of a race of club boats on the Charles at Western Avenue a few days earlier. Holmes “who is very partial to this manly exercise” is shown rowing in the lower left-hand corner.]]> Ballou's pictorial showing a boat race on the Charles]]> here. Ballou's pictorial, 1857 June 20]]> to the Boston Medical Library, 1894
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]]> ]]> “My dealing with the instrument has been principally as a teacher, and not of microscopy as a specialty, but as a fractional portion of long-extended courses on anatomy, delivered to large classes. The most I could hope for was to teach them the rudiments of histology, and more especially to give them knowledge enough to make them wish for more. I have therefore aimed at having perfectly and easily manageable instruments, at selecting the more important and interesting objects, and at making everything as plain as practicable, knowing well that if a mistake in looking through a microscope is within the bounds of possibility, the young student will be certain to make it.”]]> ]]>