Medicine

Medical Essays

by Oliver Wendell Holmes

Oliver Wendell Holmes taught anatomy at Harvard for thirty-five years and wrote The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table in his spare time. One essay here, on the contagiousness of puerperal fever, argued in 1843 that doctors were carrying childbed fever from one mother to the next, and it was much resented. It was Holmes who suggested the word anaesthesia.

The librarian

Read it in the Library After Dark Or read it as plain text

Reading time

About 8 hr 50 min

Where to find it

The Medicine Room

Edition

Project Gutenberg, eBook #2700. In the public domain in the United States.