Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

So good night, sweet dreams to you, and don't forget your promise that tomorrow you are going to help someone.

Chapter 17 we shall consider hypochondria which is a frequent result of worry thought hypochondria is the state of imagining disease which does not exist and sometimes it is the constant dwelling on a lesser ailment in the imagination that the ailment is a serious thing as far back as buddha's time we learn that all that we are is the result of what we have thought that is the same truth in another form which appears in the bible as a man thinketh in his heart so is he the poor hypochondriac imagines he has disease he feeds on that thought and the thought thrives until the sufferer is miserable and a slave to drugs and medicines Every doctor knows that if all medicines were prohibited by law, people would get well, and as Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes said, very likely the people would live longer.

The doctor knows the power of mind over matter, and personally he believes in it, but he cannot afford to express the truth in full to his patient, for the doctor commercializes mystery and benefits in proportion as he writes prescriptions.

nevertheless the doctor by suggestion gets or tries to get the mental attitude of the patient right the doctor comes in with his cheery countenance his words of courage suggestion of hope evidence of sympathy and promise of help these are the things that help the patient more than the prescription i do not decry or belittle the use of antiseptics or drugs for acute troubles or contagious diseases i am speaking now of hypochondria and trying to make it clear to you that you cannot get relief from hypochondria out of a bottle but you can get it from mental suggestion When the doctor treats the hypochondriac, it's not the medicine, but the faith in the medicine, faith in the doctor and the confidence in the doctor's promise that does the good.

But few of them grew beyond the lisping stage, and it was not until the middle of the century that any emerged from this throng to take their stand definitely beside the author of Thanatopsis.

Then, almost simultaneously, six others disengaged themselves, Longfellow, Whittier, Poe, Lowell, Holmes, and Emerson, and remain to this day the truest poets in our history.

Of Emerson we have already spoken.

His poetry has been, and still is, the subject of controversy.

Although Whittier was endowed with a brighter spark of the divine fire than Longfellow, he himself was conscious that he did not possess the seer-like power to show the secrets of the heart and mind.

He was lacking, too, in intellectual equipment, in culture, in mastery of rhythm and diction, in felicitous phrasing, and yet, on at least two occasions, he rang sublimely true, in his denunciation of Webster, Ichabod, and in his idyll of New England rural life, Snowbound.

The third of these New England poets, and also the least important, is Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Born at Cambridge, in the inner circle of New England aristocracy, educated at Harvard, and studying medicine in Boston and Paris, he practiced his profession for twelve years until, in 1847, he was called to the chair of anatomy and physiology at Harvard, continuing in that position until 1882.

Wow.

One of her patients, and this is interesting, just a side note, was Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., the famous doctor.

Really? Yes.

She nursed him through his last illness and probably was one of the last nurses that he actually had.

this the first of helen's letters to dr holmes written soon after visit to him he published in over the teacups atlantic monthly may eighteen ninety

letter thirty to dr oliver wendell holmes south boston massachusetts march first eighteen ninety dear kind poet i have thought of you many times since that bright sunday when i bade you good-bye and i am going to write you a letter because i love you i am sorry that you have no little children to play with you sometimes but i think you are very happy with your books and your many many friends on washington's birthday a great many people came here to see the blind children and i read for them from your poems and showed them some beautiful shells which came from a little island near palos i am reading a very sad story called little jakey jakey was the sweetest little fellow you can imagine but he was poor and blind i used to think when i was small and before i could read that everybody was always happy and at first it made me very sad to know about pain and great sorrow but now i know that we could never learn to be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world i am studying about insects in zoology and i have learnt many things about butterflies they do not make honey for us like the bees but many of them are as beautiful as the flowers they light upon and they always delight the hearts of little children they live a gay life flitting from flower to flower sipping the drops of honey-dew without a thought for the morrow they are just like little boys and girls when they forget books and studies and run away to the woods and the fields to gather wild flowers or wade in the ponds for fragrant lilies happy in the bright sunshine if my little sister comes to boston next june will you let me bring her to see you she is a lovely baby and i am sure you will love her now i must tell my gentle poet good-bye for i have a letter to write home before i go to bed from your loving little friend helen a keller

miss fuller gave helen keller her first lesson in articulation see chapter four speech in part three of this book

letter thirty one to miss sarah fuller south boston massachusetts april third eighteen ninety my dear miss fuller my heart is full of joy this beautiful morning because i have learned to speak many new words and i can make a few sentences last evening i went out in the yard and spoke to the moon i said o moon come to me do you think the lovely moon was glad that i could speak to her how glad my mother will be i can hardly wait for june to come i am so eager to speak to her and to my precious little sister mildred could not understand me when i spelled with my fingers but now she will sit in my lap and i will tell her many things to please her and we shall be so happy together are you very very happy because you can make so many people happy i think you are very kind and patient and i love you very dearly my teacher told me tuesday that you wanted to know how i came to wish to talk with my mouth i will tell you all about it for i remember my thoughts perfectly when i was a very little child i used to sit in my mother's lap all the time because i was very timid and i did not like to be left by myself and i would keep my little hand on her face all the while because it amused me to feel her face and lips move when she talked with people i did not know then what she was doing for i was quite ignorant of all things then when i was older i learned to play with my nurse and the little negro children and i noticed that they kept moving their lips just like my mother so i moved mine too but sometimes it made me angry and i would hold my playmates mouths very hard i did not know then that it was very naughty to do so after a long time my dear teacher came to me and taught me to communicate with my fingers and i was satisfied and happy but when i came to school in boston i met some deaf people who talked with their mouths like all other people and one day a lady who had been to norway came to see me and told me of a blind and deaf girl ragnhild katta she had seen in that far-away land who had been taught to speak and understand others when they spoke to her this good and happy news delighted me exceedingly for then i was sure that i should learn also i tried to make sounds like my little playmates but teacher told me that the voice was very delicate and sensitive and that it would injure it to make incorrect sounds and promised to take me to see a kind and wise lady who would teach me rightly that lady was yourself now i am as happy as the little birds because i can speak and perhaps i shall sing too all of my friends will be so surprised and glad your loving little pupil helen a keller

Your parents and friends must take great satisfaction in your progress.

It does great credit, not only to you, but to your instructors, who have so broken down the walls that seem to shut you in, that now your outlook seems more bright and cheerful than that of many seeing and hearing children.

Goodbye, dear Helen, with every kind wish from your friend, Oliver Wendell Holmes.

THE STORY OF MY LIFE.

Okay.

So this is written by Oliver Wendell Holmes.

I don't know the year, but I think that's 1800s.

The Deacon's Masterpiece, or The Wonderful One Horse Shay, A Logical Story Have you heard of the wonderful one-horse shay that was built in such a logical way? It ran a hundred years to a day, and then of a sudden it, ah, but stay, I'll tell you what happened without delay.

Like Father, Unlike Son number one.

[gentle music] Oliver Senior was a poet and physician equally famous for his writing as for his work in contagious diseases.

Oliver Junior served three decades on the US Supreme Court.

What was their last name?

Mr. Upham may mean more than some people would in what he says of the new opening made by science into the dark depths of mystery covered by the term witchcraft.

For he is not only the brother-in-law, but the intimate friend and associate of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, professor of anatomy and physiology at Harvard University, and still better known to us as he is at home as the writer of the physiological tales Elsie Venner and The Guardian Angel, which have impressed the public as something new in the literature of fiction.

It cannot be supposed that Mr. Upham's view of the Salem delusion would have been precisely what we find it here if he and Dr. Holmes had never met.

And but for the presence of the professor's mind throughout the book, which is most fitly dedicated to him, its readers might have perceived less clearly the true direction in which to look for a solution of the mystery of the story, and its writer might have written something less significant in the place of the following paragraph.

...

in the history of one of our books called Elsie Venner, which is like even in its 19th century lifetime, over the three editions that were published by the time the 19th century ended, like he- the author, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., becomes more racist.

Like the story stays the same, and it's touching on these themes of like human psychology and human origins.

And like over the course of the editions, he's like, "You know what these ideas work very well with?" [laughs] Is like hating and committing genocide.

This LibriVox recording is in the public domain.

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes.

It is good to go now and again.

Let the American phrase be permitted back of some of our contemporaries.

We share nothing else with them.

And we deliver ourselves from them by passing in literature into the company of an author who wrote before their time and yet is familiarly modern.

To read Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes then is to go behind the new humorist into a time before he was or his humor.

Obviously, we go in like manner behind many another.