Oliver Wendell Holmes Visits Yale

Sir William Osler said that Oliver Wendell Holmes "was the most successful combination which the world has ever seen of the physician and man of letters," and so much has been written about Doctor Holmes it may seem futile to try to add anything, but, as Holmes himself wrote about Carlyle, "He remains not the less one of the really interesting men of his generation, a man about whom we really wish to know all that we have a right to know" and so this neglected episode in Holmes' life appears to be worth recounting. Holmes lived all his years, almost literally all his days, in or near Boston. Except for two youthful years of study in Europe, a like period of teaching in Hanover, and a three months' transatlantic excursion in his old age, he was scarcely ever out of sight of the dome of the State House which he declared to be "the hub of the solar system." And as his life was, so has his fame been, completely surrounded by Boston and Harvard with little attention paid to the blessings bestowed upon him by Connecticut and Yale.