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Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

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Author

The Resume

    (August 29, 1809-October 7, 1894)
    Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts
    Physician/educator/essayist/poet
    Dean of Harvard Medical School (1847-82)
    Essays for the Atlantic Monthly collected in 'The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table' (1858), 'The Professor of the Breakfast Table' (1860) and 'The Poet of the Breakfast Table' (1872)
    Poems include 'The Chambered Nautilus' and 'Old Ironsides'
    Father of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Why he might be annoying:

    During a debate about which claimant to discovering anesthesia, William Morton or Charles Jackson, should be honored with a monument, he suggested using busts of both men and the inscription 'To Ether.' ('To Ether' = 'To Either,' get it?)
    He admitted a female student and a black student to Harvard Medical School, but quickly folded in the face of student protests.
    He called Boston 'the thinking center of the continent and therefore of the planet.'
    He would indulge his vanity in his old age by telling people who praised his work, 'I am a trifle deaf. Would you mind repeating that a little louder?'

Why he might not be annoying:

    His lectures were so entertaining that his classes were scheduled for the end of the afternoon, because he was the only professor who could keep the students awake after a long day.
    He had so many duties at Harvard he was described as occupying 'not a chair but a settee in the school.'
    Along with Ignaz Semmelweis, he was an early advocate of cleanliness in obstetrics, which one medical historian called 'the most important contribution made in America to the advancement of medicine' at the time.
    His poem 'Old Ironsides' kept the US Navy from scrapping the USS Constitution (now the oldest American warship still afloat).
    His Breakfast Table essays were so popular, they were credited with keeping the Atlantic Monthly from folding during the Panic of 1857.

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    For 2024, as of last weekly ranking, Out of 1 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2023, Out of 2 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 2 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 11 Votes: 72.73% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 3 Votes: 66.67% Annoying
    In 2019, Out of 4 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2018, Out of 1 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2017, Out of 2 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2016, Out of 4 Votes: 25.00% Annoying
    In 2015, Out of 6 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2014, Out of 14 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2013, Out of 10 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2012, Out of 11 Votes: 54.55% Annoying
    In 2011, Out of 11 Votes: 18.18% Annoying
    In 2010, Out of 16 Votes: 25.00% Annoying