Holmes: Oliver Wendell

Holmes, Oliver Wendell. The Poet at the Breakfast Table. James R. Osgood and Company, Boston. 1872. 

More positive a view still, yet no less racial, is Oliver Wendell Holmes s philo-Semitic paean At the Pantomime (1874) ... 

In response to these wild claims and harmful side effects, medical societies called for regulation of patent medicines. The dean of the Harvard Medical School, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., said in 1860 before the Massachusetts Medical Society that if all available drugs could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be better for mankind, and all the worse for the fishes. 4 An expose of the patent drug industry called The Great American Fraud by Samuel Hopkins Adams appeared in Collier s Weekly in 1905. Hopkins accused the industry of relying on fake testimonials and fraud to poison the public. 

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., physician at the Harvard Medical School from 1847 to 1882 and opponent of patent drugs. In one quote he said that destroying available drugs would be better for mankind. His views and those of other physicians would lead to reform of drug use for medical purposes. 

The words anaesthesia and anaesthetic were first used by Oliver Wendell Holmes in a letter to the surgeon William Morton dated 21st November 1846. The Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland have a museum in central Lon-... 

Bottom Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809—1894), Ameri can writer and physician, [From Medicine /In Historical copyright 1931... 

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Currents and Counter-Currents in Medical Science, in Medical Essays, 1842-1882 (Boston Houghton Mifflin, 1883), p. 203. 

Eleanor M. Tilton, Amiable Autocrat A Biography of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (New York Henry Schuman, 1947), p. 255. 

As early as the 1840s, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (father of the Supreme Court justice) advocated that physicians should wash their hands between patient visits. His ideas were considered extreme and slightly mad at the time, but eventually hand washing became routine throughout the world of medical practice and beyond. Today many people are required by law to wash their hands as a condition of employment because frequent hand washing is still considered the single most effective way to prevent the spread of communicable disease. 

As soon as in 1785, a solution of chlorine gas in water was used to bleach textiles. Potassium hypochlorite (Eau de Javel) was prepared by Berthollet in 1789. In 1820, Antoine G. Labarraque replaced potash liquor by the cheaper caustic soda liquor and thus was bom sodium hypochlorite. At the end of the 1820s, Robert Collins, then Oliver Wendell Holmes showed that puerperal (childbed) fever frequency decreased when midwives wash their hands... 

Dunn, P. M. Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) and his essay on puerperal fever. Arch. Dis. Child Fetal Neonatal. 2007, 92, F325-F327. 

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