Oliver Wendell Holmes : remarks made at the Johns Hopkins Medical Society, October 15, 1894 / by William Osler, M.D.

  • William Osler
Date:
1894
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Oliver Wendell Holmes : remarks made at the Johns Hopkins Medical Society, October 15, 1894 / by William Osler, M.D. 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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    [From The Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin, No. 42, October, 1S94.] OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.* By Wm. Osler, M. D. Very fitting indeed is it that he who had lived to be “ the last leaf upon the tree” should have fallen peacefully in the autumn which he loved so well. Delightful, too, to think that although he had, to use the expression of Benjamin Franklin, intruded himself these many years into the company of posterity, the freshness and pliancy of his mind had not for a moment failed. Like his own wonderful “one-hoss shay.” the end was a sudden breakdown; and though he would have confessed, no doubt, to “ a general flavor of decay ” there was nothing local, and his friends had been spared that most dis- tressing of all human spectacles, those cold gradations of decay, in which a man takes nearly as long to die as he does to grow up, and lives a sort of death in life, “ita sine vifa vivere, ita sine morte mori” Enough has been said, and doubtless well said, by those who make criticism their vocation, upon the literary position and affinities of Oliver Wendell Holmes, and I shall spare your perhaps already surcharged ears. He has been sandwiched in my affections these many years between Oliver Goldsmith and Charles Lamb. More than once he has been called, I think, the American Goldsmith. Certainly the great distinction of both men lies in that robust humanity which has a smile for the foibles and a tear for the sorrows of their fellow-creatures. The English Oliver, with a better schooling for a poet (had he not learned in suffering what he taught in song F), had a finer fancy and at his best a clearer note. With both writers one is at a loss to know which to love the better, the prose or the poetry. Can we name two other prose-writers of equal merit, who have so successfully courted the “ draggle-tailed Muses,” as Goldsmith calls them? Like Charles Lamb, Holmes gains the affections of his readers at the first sitting ^Remarks made at the Johns Hopkins Medical Society, October 15, 1894.