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Celebrating the bicentennial of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes

Cambridge, MA – Several community organizations are working together to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. A ceremony will be held on August 29 at 10:00 a.m. at Bigelow Chapel, Mount Auburn Cemetery, in Cambridge. The event features a performance by Dr. Holmes (portrayed by actor Wendell Refior) and a lecture by noted scholar Dr. Charles S. Bryan. A wreath will then be laid at the plot of Dr. Holmes in Mount Auburn. The event is free and open to the public.

Dr. Holmes was born in Cambridge on August 29, 1809 in a “gambrel-roofed house” near the Cambridge Common which is no longer standing. During his 85 years, Holmes became an author, lecturer, poet, scholar, doctor, medical reformer, and one of the leading voices of Boston culture. His poem “Old Ironsides” (1830) led to public support to keep the USS Constitution from being scrapped. He coined the word for “anesthesia” as well as the term “Boston Brahmin” and offered the name for the Atlantic Monthly. It was also Dr. Holmes who nicknamed Boston as the “Hub” of the solar system.

Over his many years, he befriended many of the most important figures of his generation, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell. Dr. Holmes outlived all of them and, as each of his friends died, he wrote a poem to their memory. When Dr. Holmes himself died in 1894, however, none were left to memorialize him in verse, effectively making him “The Last Leaf,” just as he predicted in his 1831 poem of that name. He wrote that if he were “the last leaf upon the tree” that people should “smile, as I do now.” In honor of Dr. Holmes’s bicentennial, this event is a celebration of his life, his accomplishments, and his memory.

Actor Wendell Refior has been studying the 19th-century for several years, particularly as a scholar of Ralph Waldo Emerson. He has impersonated Emerson throughout Massachusetts, including at the Emerson bicentennial in 2003. He is a life member of the Emerson Society and serves on its board through 2009. He is also a teacher and lecturer when not too busy with his Cambridge biotech statistical analysis job. This will be his first public portrayal as Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Dr. Charles S. Bryan is Heyward Gibbes Distinguished Professor of Internal Medicine Emeritus at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine, where his positions included chair of the Department of Medicine and director of the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities. He currently works at Providence Hospitals, Columbia, South Carolina, as a consultant and practicing physician. His research and publications have focused mostly on infectious diseases, medical history, and medical biography. His honors include the Nicholas E. Davies Memorial Scholar Award of the American College of Physicians, of which he is a Master.

The event is organized and sponsored by the Friends of Mount Auburn Cemetery, the Cambridge Historical Society, and the Center for the History of Medicine at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine.