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
]]>This copy of the first edition was in the library of Oliver Wendell Holmes.
]]>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.
]]>Holmes was also awarded two Boylston Prizes in 1837 for separate essays on neuralgia and intermittent fever in New England.
]]>Holmes was also awarded two Boylston Prizes in 1837 for separate essays on neuralgia and intermittent fever in New England.
]]>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.”
]]>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.”
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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….”
]]>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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