Oliver Wendell Holmes Symposium

Save the Date!
November 17, 2009, 1:00 PM- 5:00 PM, reception 5:00-6:30
Location: Countway Library, 10 Shattuck St., Boston

Featuring:
• Charles S. Bryan: "The Greatest Brahmin: Overview of a Life"
• Peter Gibian: "Doctor Holmes: The Life in Conversation"
• Michael A. Weinstein: “Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Depth Psychology: A Reconstruction”
• John S. Haller, Jr.: "Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Challenge of Homeopathy: A Reappraisal"
• Amalie M. Kass: “A Private Pestilence: Holmes and Puerperal Fever"
• Charles E. Rosenberg: “OWH and the Social Logic of Medical Therapeutics”
• And introductory remarks by Scott H. Podolsky, Director of the Center for the History of Medicine.

In addition to this event will be the opening of an exhibit of Holmes materials from the Center for the History of Medicine's collections.

This event is free and open to all.

Please RSVP to ARM@hms.harvard.edu

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) spent parts of the nineteenth century as America’s best-known physician and best-selling author. Sir William Osler praised him as “the most successful combination which the world has ever seen, of the physician and man of letters.” Henry James, Sr., called him “intellectually the most alive man I ever knew.” Today, he is remembered as a physician for his investigation of the contagiousness of puerperal fever (two decades before the advent of the germ theory), his advocacy for therapeutic skepticism and rationalism, and for coining such terms as “anesthesia.” He is celebrated as a literary and cultural figure for such poems as “Old Ironsides” (considered responsible for saving the U.S.S. Constitution), for his early forays into what would be considered a new depth psychology, and for terming Boston the “Hub of the solar system” and describing its “Brahmin” caste.