Oliver Wendell Holmes and the contagiousness of puerperal fever : an address delivered at Marlborough, Wiltshire, to the Trowbridge division of the Bath and Bristol branch of the British Medical Association, October 28, 1905 / by Charles J. Cullingworth.

  • Cullingworth, Charles J. (Charles James), 1841-1908.
Date:
1906
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Oliver Wendell Holmes and the contagiousness of puerperal fever : an address delivered at Marlborough, Wiltshire, to the Trowbridge division of the Bath and Bristol branch of the British Medical Association, October 28, 1905 / by Charles J. Cullingworth. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    to avoid comparing them with the eloquent but terrible warnings of the preacher-prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures. It was not the fault of those old stalwarts, that the messaije they had to deliver was unillumined by a gospel that had not yet been revealed, any more than it was the fault of Wendell Holmes and of the distinguished Hungarian, who, a few years later and as the result of independent observation, arrived at the same truth and encountered an opposition even more relentless, that they were unable to point to the more excellent way of prevention, with which we, thanks to later revelations, have since become familiar. Pasteur and Lister had not as yet instituted those researches of which the result has been to place in our hands, if we would but use it, an effectual means not only of checking the spread of puerperal fever but of stamping it out. All honour to the men who, without these researches to guide them and merely from a study of clinical facts, recognized the main facts in the propagation of puerperal fever, and advocated for its prevention measures which differ in degree rather than in kind from those en- joined by the most scientific and advanced teachers of the present day. It is interesting to remember, in connection with recent discussions as to the time of life at which a man turns out his best work, that this essay was published when Holmes was thirty-three. It was not until four years later that he was appointed to the Parkman Professorship of Anatomy and Physiology in the Medical School of Harvard University, which, by the way, he described as being not so much a chair as a whole settee, and the anatomical portion of which he retained for thirty-six years. He had as yet no literary fame, except such as was derived from his contributions to various College magazines, a prize essay on Intermittent Fever in New England (1837), and two lectures delivered in 1842