ABSTRACT
Oliver Wendell Holmes (2) It must have been a dark and damp day-that May 30, 1860-a typical wet Boston spring day, when Oliver Wendell Holmes addressed his medical col-
leagues at the Massachusetts Medical Society. Maybe Holmes was in something of an irascible mood that day, when he made the above statement. I can imagine that many in Holmes’s audience were more preoccupied with the great issues of the day-civil war, slavery, abolition, a vital presidential election-than with seemingly harmless potions. But Holmes, the famous physician and writer and Harvard Medical School professor (later eclipsed in fame by his son the Supreme Court justice), did not toss off those words as a mere peripheral opinion. That day, at the medical society, he gave a lecture that built up to the argument he made, a considered examination of the nature of medication treatments, and his conclusion that aside from certain specific treatments, most medications were worthless or, worse, harmful. Maybe he meant to provoke. And, indeed, his lecture stimulated a great deal of discussion about the topic that continued long afterwards, and Holmes’s statement is still not infrequently quoted in many contexts.
