Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was born on August 18, 1809, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A graduate of Harvard Medical School in 1836, he became a respected physician, professor, and writer. His medical career was marked by groundbreaking discoveries, including his pioneering research on the cause of puerperal fever, in which he argued that the disease was contagious and transmitted by physicians. Although his ideas initially faced resistance, they were eventually widely accepted and led to significant improvements in hospital hygiene.
Parallel to his medical career, Holmes developed a prolific career as a poet, essayist, and lecturer. His poems, often characterized by their humor, wit, and reflections on life and society, made him one of the most popular poets in the United States during his time. He was one of the founders of the literary magazine The Atlantic Monthly in 1857, where he published many of his best-known essays. Holmes was also an active member of Boston's intellectual life, participating in literary clubs and scientific societies.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. passed away on October 7, 1894, in Boston, Massachusetts. His legacy endures in both medicine and literature, and he is remembered as one of the most influential figures of the 19th century in the United States. His son, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., followed in his father's footsteps, becoming a prominent jurist and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Poems List
It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
2
But I have long thought that if you knew a column of advertisements by heart, you could achieve unexpected felicities with them. You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye.
3
It will need more than the Nineteenth Amendment to convince me that there are no differences between men and women, or that legislation cannot take those differences into account.
2
I . . . probably take the extremest view in favor of free speech, (in which, in the abstract, I have no very enthusiastic belief, though I hope I would die for it).
2
But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.
4
Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to be perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power and want a certain result with all your heart you naturally express your wishes in law and sweep away all opposition.
3
I abhor, loathe, and despise these long discourses, and agree with Carducci the Italian poet who died some years ago that a man who takes half a page to say what can be said in a sentence will be damned.
2
The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi-sovereign that can be identified.
2
I do not think we need trouble ourselves with the thought that my view depends upon differences of degree. The whole law does so as soon as it is civilized. . . . Negligence is all degree—that of the defendant here degree of the nicest sort; and between the variations according to distance that I suppose to exist and the simple universality of the rules in the Twelve Tables of the Leges Barbarorum, there lies the culture of two thousand years.
2
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