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American · 1809-1894 · 17 quotes
American · 1809–1894
17 quotes in our collection
Oliver Wendell Holmes was the American physician, poet, and essayist whose Breakfast-Table series — beginning with The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table in 1858 — made him one of the most widely read American writers of the nineteenth century. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1809, he trained as a physician at Harvard and in Paris, established the germ theory of puerperal fever before Pasteur, and taught anatomy at Harvard for thirty-five years. His poems — most famously The Chambered Nautilus and Old Ironsides — were recited in schoolrooms across the country. His aphorisms have the quick intelligence of a doctor and a wit: to be seventy years young is sometimes far more hopeful than to be forty years old; every mind that is stretched by a new idea can never shrink back to its old dimensions. He was the father of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
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