In 1854—when Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was thirteen years old—the Boston Public Library opened. It was the first free, publicly supported library in the country, and the first to allow its books to be borrowed. When the library moved four years later to a larger building, its seventy thousand volumes were carried in grand procession down the street on New Year’s Day, accompanied by city officials, militia companies, brass bands, and Harvard’s professors marching in cap and gown.14
IF BOSTON SEEMED to be fired with a religious zeal to promote learning, literature, and culture, it was because it was.
Religion in New England had always made social morality, and by extension civic duty, its business. “To the New England mind,” wrote Henry Adams, “roads, schools, clothes, and a clean face were connected as part of the law of order or divine system. Bad roads meant bad morals.” Or, as the historian Richard Hofstadter more seriously put it, deep in the Yankee Protestant tradition was “the idea that everyone was in some very serious sense responsible for everything.”15
The democratic spirit of the Revolution had brought about a revolution in Boston’s churches that galvanized anew that sense of everyone being “responsible for everything.” The stern Calvinist doctrine that thundered from generations of New England pulpits offered the faithful a powerful and wrathful God, saw sinfulness and corruption as the inherent state of mankind, and capped it with the hopeless fate of predestination, by which men were already assigned to the elect and the damned. Americans who had overthrown a despotic king could not now help bridling at a despotic God. “We cannot bow before a being, however great, who governs tyrannically,” declared William Ellery Channing, a Congregational minister and founder of the movement that would come to be called Unitarianism.16
The inscription at the base of his monument in the Boston Public Garden reads, “He breathed into theology a humane spirit.” From its beginnings among the liberally minded clergy of Harvard around 1800, Unitarianism within a decade swept into the pulpits of nearly every Congregational church in and around Boston. When a conservative Presbyterian minister, Lyman Beecher, arrived in Boston in 1816, he found that “all the literary men of Massachusetts were Unitarian; all the trustees and professors at Harvard College were Unitarian; all the elite of wealth and fashion crowded Unitarian churches.”17
Unitarianism’s fundamental tenet was that God had given man a rational nature and a moral conscience, and expected him to use them. Salvation was no longer to be found in outward conformity to rigid doctrine or unquestioning obedience to an unknowable God, but lay rather within each man’s own conscience. Nowhere did the new belief differ more dramatically from the old than in its emphasis on the innate goodness and perfectibility of man, a complete reversal of the “total depravity” that Calvinism saw as inextricable in man’s nature.
To later generations, Unitarianism was usually the punch line of a joke about lukewarm faith. Fanny Holmes once humorously explained to her husband’s secretary that they were Unitarian because “in Boston you had to be something, and Unitarian was the least you could be.”18 Unitarianism derived its name from its rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity; the old joke in Boston was that a Unitarian was a person who “believes in at most one God.”
But the generation that grew up with its liberating ideas had all the moral zealotry of its sinners-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-God forebears, now channeled into a faith that made self-improvement, the cultivation of virtue, and social conscience the ultimate expression of God’s will. Unitarianism was sometimes summarized as “Calvinism without God,” but for that first generation it would have been more accurately described as Puritanism without Calvinism. “The Unitarians, born Unitarians, have a pale, shallow, religion,” Emerson commented in his journal; “but the Calvinist born & reared under his vigorous, ascetic, scowling creed, & then ripened into a Unitarian, becomes powerful.”19
That power expressed itself most manifestly in the irrepressible optimism and enthusiasm for causes that filled the Boston of Dr. Holmes’s generation. Libraries, schools, and hospitals were merely the start. “Not a reading man but has a draft of a new Community in his waistcoat pocket,” said Emerson in 1840. To every social ill and vice that had beset mankind throughout the ages—poverty, war, criminality, mental illness, drunkenness, prostitution—Boston had a solution. Appealing to the better nature that lay within every human being was the answer. There were societies to promote thrift and savings, societies to rehabilitate “fallen women,” societies to uplift the morals of sailors in port, by providing them with reading rooms and religious services. Prisons would become “reformatories” to foster repentance and rehabilitation; the temperance movement would awaken the populace to the undeniable evils of drink; workhouses would inculcate the poor with the moral virtues of frugality, industry, and punctuality, and so eliminate beggary and idleness.20
Boston’s faith in education ultimately reflected Unitarianism’s faith in man’s inherent rationality and goodness. If the answers lay within, politics mattered less than self-improvement through learning and self-mastery through the cultivation of conscience; moral advancement would follow inevitably, of its own accord, once men were acquainted with the truth, and achieved the wisdom to embrace it. “How much was then expected from reforms in education,” the Unitarian minister Edward Everett Hale ruefully remarked many years later. “There was the real impression that the kingdom of heaven was to be brought in . . . if we only knew enough.”21
It was, said the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, the age when “wise men hoped.”22 Those of the next generation, seared by the reality and bloodshed of war, would use less charitable words when they looked back upon the political naïveté and easy moralizing of the intellectual leaders of the faith that had filled the days of their youth. Henry Adams, friend and contemporary of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., grandson and great-grandson of presidents, instructor in history at Harvard, described the comfortable beliefs of prewar Boston with none too gentle sarcasm from the perspective of a half century later:
Viewed from Mount Vernon Street, the problem of life was as simple as it was classic. Politics offered no difficulties, for there the moral law was a sure guide. Social perfection was also sure, because human nature worked for Good. . . . Education was divine, and man needed only a correct knowledge of facts to reach perfection. . . . Difficulties might be ignored; doubts were a waste of thought; nothing exacted solution. Boston had solved the universe.23
THE UNITARIAN REVOLUTION arrived in the Cambridge home of Dr. Holmes’s youth in a rather different, and more personal, fashion.
The doctor’s father, Abiel Holmes, was indubitably a member of the Brahmin caste. He possessed a library of two thousand books. His first wife was the daughter of the Reverend Ezra Stiles, president of Yale College. His own family tree had roots and branches extending to many Boston names of eminence—Quincy, Cabot, Bradstreet, Jackson.
As minister of Cambridge’s First Congregational Parish, Abiel Holmes was a mild Calvinist, but a Calvinist nonetheless, in the least hospitable spot in all of Massachusetts for a preacher of the old creed. The family home, facing Cambridge Common, was as close to Harvard Yard as any private residence could be. (Its site was just to the west of the present-day Littauer Center, in the North Yard.) In 1828 the liberal majority of the Reverend Holmes’s congregation began addressing a litany of increasingly confrontational complaints to their more orthodox pastor, who had apparently decided, after thirty years in the pulpit, suddenly to take a stand against creeping doctrinal innovation. His congregation was particularly incensed that their minister had barred Unitarian-minded preachers of other churches in the area from giving sermons in his church and that he had instituted evening lectures intended to “prosylete the liberal part of the parishioners” to the “harsh, unreasonable & unscriptural creed” of the “Calvinistic exclusive system.”24 The following year he was forced out, taking sixty of his parishioners with him.
The old Holmes house next to Harva
rd Yard
Abiel Holmes seems to have been far less strict in the religious instruction of his own children, which hints that he may have had more doubts than he cared to admit publicly. “I had an old worn-out catechism as my text-book on the one hand,” Dr. Holmes recalled, “and a Unitarian atmosphere in the other, surrounding me as soon as I stepped out of my door.” His father made him do little more than recite the catechism to his mother, but that was enough to make him a lifelong skeptic. “My mind early revolted,” he said, at being informed that “we were a set of little fallen wretches, exposed to the wrath of God by the fact of that existence which we could not help.” The doctrine of original sin, Dr. Holmes thought, had “spread its gloom over the whole world of Christendom,” and “enslaved” the human intellect.25
Holmes’s grandfather, the Reverend Abiel Holmes
His recollections of the interminable Sundays of his youth, walking to church for his father’s second service of the day, the “three hymns more or less lugubrious, rendered by a village-choir, got into voice by many preliminary snuffles and other expiratory efforts, and accompanied by the snort of a huge bass-viol which wallowed through the tune like a hippopotamus,” completed a picture of Calvinist oppression he was eager to escape. The new world of science offered not only an intellectual, but a spiritual, haven. “Ever since I paid ten cents for a peep through the telescope on the Common, and saw the transit of Venus,” he wrote, “my whole idea of the creation has been singularly changed.”26
Still, Dr. Holmes remained a lifelong churchgoer, attending Unitarian services at the venerable King’s Chapel in Boston, a point that his far more skeptical son occasionally twitted him for. “Of course my father was by no means orthodox,” Holmes told his philosopher friend Morris Cohen many years later, “but like other even lax Unitarians there were questions that he didn’t like to have asked . . . so that when I wanted to be disagreeable I told him that he straddled, in order to be able to say, whatever might be accepted, well I always have recognized etc. . . .”27
First Congregational Parish in Cambridge
But the fact was that Boston religion was too much a part of the air that both Oliver Wendell Holmes senior and junior breathed in their youths ever to dispense with altogether; in their own ways, even as they rebelled, religion always remained the context of their rebellion.
THROUGHOUT HIS LIFE, Dr. Holmes could do anything except stick to anything.
Fortunately for him, he had the talent and the circumstances to get away with it. “I, then, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Junior in Harvard University, am a plumeless biped of the height of exactly five feet three inches when standing in a pair of substantial boots,” he described himself at age eighteen in a letter to a boyhood friend. “I am rather lazy than otherwise, and certainly do not study as hard as I ought to. I am not dissipated and I am not sedate.”28
The year after he graduated from Harvard he published in the Boston Daily Advertiser a poem decrying the navy’s plan to dismantle the Constitution, the Boston-built frigate whose famous victories against the British Royal Navy had turned the tide in the War of 1812. “Old Ironsides” exactly caught popular feeling with its indignant exhortation,
O, better that her shattered hulk
Should sink beneath the wave
It gave the young Holmes a name as a poet, and in the ensuing wave of public protest the navy reversed its decision.
He enrolled in Harvard Law School, but neglected his studies when a college periodical “tempted me into print,” he confessed. “And there is no form of lead-poisoning which more rapidly and thoroughly pervades the blood and bones and marrow than that which reaches the young author through mental contact with type-metal.”29
The next year he switched to medicine, reporting his “startling position” to his friend with no further explanation than, “I did not like the one, and I do like the other.”30
Completing his medical studies, but not the thesis required for graduation, he announced he was going to Paris. His parents, who had vaguely uneasy ideas about what young men wanted to go to Paris for, worried but needn’t have. He wrote home with enthusiasm about the “concentrated scientific atmosphere” of the city, the ease with which he had mastered the language (“I understand my French lectures almost as perfectly as English”), the number of interesting cases he was able to attend, and the culture, food, and theater.31 He saw the sights of London and Rome, then returned home to learn that if he was to receive his medical degree from Harvard that year, he had only three days to submit his thesis—which he did. Later that year he was invited to present the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard’s bicentennial, and delivered his poem, an hour and ten minutes long, from memory.32
He made a brief if brilliant foray into medical research, publishing two scientific papers that showed a startling clarity and grasp of statistical methods, as well as a poetic deftness with a revelatory turn of phrase that his son would later bring to the law. To the outrage of the medical establishment, Dr. Holmes argued that puerperal, or childbed, fever—a fatal infection that afflicted thousands of women following childbirth—was spread from patient to patient by attending doctors and midwives. This was in 1843, before the germ theory of disease was known, but from an extensive survey of cases he found that the illness was always associated with a handful of practitioners in any given locale, confirming its contagious nature:
It does appear a singular coincidence, that one man or woman should have ten, twenty, thirty, or seventy cases of this rare disease, following their footsteps with the keenness of a beagle, through the streets and lanes of a crowded city, while the scores that cross the same paths on the same errands know it only by name.33
He concluded that a doctor who had had even a single case should consider his next patient at risk of death, and upbraided his colleagues for not washing and changing their clothes after performing autopsies. Given the irrefutable facts, he declared, the deaths of women from such an entirely preventable cause “should be looked upon not as a misfortune but a crime.”34
He took on homeopathic remedies with equal fearlessness, in a lecture that to this day is one of the most lucid expositions of the fallacies of medical quackery and the placebo effect. He pointed out that while some patients receiving useless treatments might “have been actually benefited through the influence exerted upon their imaginations,” that no more justified pseudoscience than would “justifying the counterfeiter and giving circulation to his base coin, on the ground that a spurious dollar had often relieved a poor man’s necessities.”35
Both papers provoked furious counterattacks; both are striking for how far ahead of their time they were. Yet it was typical of Dr. Holmes’s more serious attempts at recognition that for many years a later paper by another researcher was credited with the discovery of the contagiousness of puerperal fever, his own groundbreaking contribution of nearly two decades before forgotten.
He could never sit still. In the early years of his marriage he went on the lecture circuit, earning the not inconsiderable sum of $1,200 a year delivering popular talks (“Love of Nature,” “The English Poets,” “History of Medicine”), even as he bemoaned the dissipation of the mind and spirit that came from delivering the same talk over and over. (“All lecturers, all professors, all schoolmasters, have ruts and grooves in their minds,” the Autocrat observed.)36
He saw patients, but never made much of an effort to build his practice, admitting that the thing he liked most about practicing medicine was that it required him to keep a horse and chaise, which he enjoyed driving—inexpertly, his acquaintances recalled with a shudder—at high speeds through the streets. He often jokingly threatened to hang a sign at his door announcing, “The smallest fevers thankfully received.” As his biographer and nephew John T. Morse Jr. noted, it made people with no fevers laugh but those with fevers think they might prefer to consult someone who took the matter a little more seriously.37
He knew that you could be funny or you could be a doctor, b
ut he could not help it, and composed a funny couplet expressing the dilemma:
It’s a vastly pleasing prospect, when you’re screwing out a laugh,
That your very next year’s income is diminished by a half.38
After a few years he let his practice dwindle away: his son vividly remembered the day Dr. Holmes went out and sawed the “Dr.” off the front of his name on the sign that hung at their front door.39 He continued to teach anatomy at Harvard Medical School; he was second to none in his dissection skills, and kept his students awake with a string of memorably bizarre comparisons of anatomical structures to everyday objects, while exhorting them to “fearlessness in meeting the unknown,” a colleague recalled. But it was never enough to occupy his mind.40
He invented a new stereoscopic viewer, but could not be bothered to patent it; he taught himself photography, developing his own plates using the difficult wet process of the day; he amused himself building an electrical apparatus that could make sparks an inch long leap through the air, and dabbled in experiments in chemistry and mineralogy; he knew everything about trees, bookbinding, prizefights, boating, and trotting horses. At one point he decided to take up the violin, to the bewilderment of his friends who had suffered through his “unmusical” attempts at singing. Every day, he shut himself in his study to practice upon his instrument “with surprising industry,” Morse recalled, “and a satisfaction out of all proportion to his achievement.”41
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