Poet who pinned down puerperal fever

Circumstances beyond my control (as they say) prevented the appearance of my page scheduled for the 29 August 2009 issue, for which I had written a piece about the American poet and essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes.

He was born on that date 200 years ago and was regarded by his peers as one of the greatest poets of the 19th century.

Despite the six-week delay, I think we should still remember Holmes, though not as a poet. He should instead be celebrated as an important medical reformer.

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Holmes was admitted to Harvard College at the age of 16. After graduating in 1829, he briefly studied law before turning to medicine.

He was awarded an MD degree by Harvard Medical School in 1836 and for some years maintained a small medical practice while spending much of his time on research and teaching.

In 1843, Holmes published a paper on “The contagiousness of puerperal fever”. Challenging established opinion, he argued that the deadly infection contracted by many women during or after childbirth was passed from patient to patient by their physicians.

He offered a mass of evidence for his theory and insisted that any physician who experienced even one case of the disease had a moral duty to purify his instruments, burn the clothing he had worn during the delivery and suspend obstetric practice for six months or more.

Holmes’s theory met with hostility from eminent obstetricians of the day, one of whom wrote: “Doctors are gentlemen, and gentlemen’s hands are clean.” (When Ignaz Semmelweis reached conclusions similar to Holmes’s in Vienna a few years later, he too was ridiculed or at best ignored.) Although it was considered controversial at the time, Holmes’s essay on puerperal fever is now seen as a landmark in the germ theory of disease.

Holmes also coined the word “anaesthesia”, first used in 1846 in a letter to a pioneering dentist who was the first practitioner to demonstrate publicly the use of ether during surgery. Holmes predicted that his new term would be “repeated by the tongues of every civilised race of mankind”.

In 1847 Holmes was awarded a professorship at Harvard Medical School. Before long he again courted controversy by asking the school to admit a woman. His request was rejected. And in 1850 Holmes caused a further rumpus when he accepted three African-American students into the school. Sadly, opposition to their admission saw them expelled after only one semester.

However, although the first female student was not to be admitted until 100 years later, it was only a few years before the first black students were accepted.

After 35 years as a professor, Holmes retired in 1882. He died peacefully in 1894.