Compagnonnage

1829 · 3117 — E.W. Metcalf and Company Cambridge 1829 Bound in half leather and brown cloth-covered boards gilt ruling and spine lettering top edge gilt 9 3/4 x 5 3/4 inches marbled endpapers 26 pp. Very good ring stain cloth front board; slight foxing pages. A beautiful binding and a clean book block. Oliver Wendell Holmes appears in the 1829 list. The Wikipedia entry on Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. is excellent. "Holmes was awarded his M.D. from Harvard in 1836; he wrote his dissertation on acute pericarditis. .He also gained a greater reputation after winning Harvard Medical School's prestigious Boylston Prize for which he submitted a paper on the benefits of using the stethoscope a device with which many American doctors were not familiar. .He often criticized traditional medical practices and once quipped that if all contemporary medicine was tossed into the sea "it would be all the better for mankindand all the worse for the fishes". .he composed a series of three lectures dedicated to exposing medical fallacies or "quackeries". .he took great pains to reveal the false reasoning and misrepresentation of evidence that marked subjects such as "Astrology and Alchemy" his first lecture and "Medical Delusions of the Past" his second. He deemed homeopathy the subject of his third lecture "the pretended science" that was a "mingled mass of perverse ingenuity of tinsel erudition of imbecile credulity and of artful misrepresentation too often mingled in practice". .In 1843 Holmes published "The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever" in the short-lived publication New England Quarterly Journal of Medicine and Surgery. The essay arguedcontrary to popular belief at the time which predated germ theory of diseasethat the cause of puerperal fever a deadly infection contracted by women during or shortly after childbirth stems from patient to patient contact via their physicians. Holmes gathered a large collection of evidence for this theory including stories of doctors who had become ill and died after performing autopsies on patients who had likewise been infected. In concluding his case he insisted that a physician in whose practice even one case of puerperal fever had occurred had a moral obligation to purify his instruments burn the clothing he had worn while assisting in the fatal delivery and cease obstetric practice for a period of at least six months. A few years later Ignaz Semmelweis would reach similar conclusions in Vienna where his introduction of prophylaxis handwashing in chlorine solution before assisting at delivery would considerably lower the puerperal mortality rate. Though it largely escaped notice when first published Holmes eventually came under attack by two distinguished professors of obstetricsHugh L. Hodge and Charles D. Meigswho adamantly denied his theory of contagion. .Charles D. Meigs an opponent of Holmes's theory regarding the contagious nature of puerperal fever wrote that doctors are gentlemen and "gentlemen's hands are clean". .In 1855 Holmes chose to republish the essay in the form of a pamphlet under the new title Puerperal Fever as a Private Pestilence. In a new introduction in which Holmes directly addressed his opponents he wrote: "I had rather rescue one mother from being poisoned by her attendant than claim to have saved forty out of fifty patients to whom I had carried the disease." He added "I beg to be heard in behalf of the women whose lives are at stake until some stronger voice shall plead for them." The then controversial work is now considered a landmark in germ theory of disease. .In 1846 Holmes coined the word "anesthesia". .While dean Holmes attempted to admit the first African-Americans and the first woman to the Harvard Medical School." 3214027. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Very Good. E.W. Metcalf and Company, Cambridge hardcover