Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. has Published 346 Poems
Born: August 29, 1809 - Cambridge, Massachusetts, US
Died: October 7, 1894 - Boston, Massachusetts, US
Oliver Wendell Holmes the elder was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the son of a minister, was a physician by profession but his fame was achieved as a writer; he was one of the best regarded American poets of the 19th century.
Educated at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts and at Harvard University and accomplished a national reputation with his poem "Old Ironsides" about the 18th century battleship USS Constitution, which was to be broken up for scrap; the poem generated public sentiment that resulted in the historic ship being preserved as a monument.
He studied medicine in Paris for three years then returned to get his doctorate at Harvard in 1836, the same year the first book of his verse was published. He then became a professor of anatomy and physiology at Dartmouth College.
From the inception of the Atlantic Monthly, he was a contributor of essays and poems, he also published novels. His son Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was to become Supreme Court Justice.
In an 1846 letter to William T. G. Morton (the dentist who was the first practitioner to publicly demonstrate the use of ether during surgery) Holmes coined the word anaesthesia.
Holmes died in Boston, in 1894, and is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts
