Oliver Wendell Holmes

Oliver Wendell Holmes was a Boston physician, professor of anatomy at Harvard, and the wit of the Saturday Club, whose Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table made him famous and whose son became the Supreme Court justice. The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever of 1843 argued from the evidence that childbed fever was carried from patient to patient by doctors’ hands, and that a physician who had attended a case should not deliver a woman for weeks, four years before Semmelweis and decades before the germ theory explained why. The obstetricians attacked him. The Harvard Classics print it as a model of medical reasoning.