Two Bostonians, Henry Ingersoll Bowditch (1808-1892) and Oliver Wendell
Holmes (1809-1894), went to Paris for advanced medical training and
came home ardent disciples of Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis, leader
of the French school that derived its eminence from expert auscultation
and careful correlation of bedside and autopsy findings. Both Bowditch
and Holmes became leaders in 19th-century American medicine. Bowditch,
a successful practitioner and prolific medical writer, wrote the first
important American text on physical examination and became our first
specialist in pulmonary disease. He pioneered in the public health
movement, was a charter member and later president of the American Medical
Association, and was an abolitionist and an advocate for equal rights for
women in medicine. Holmes left practice to become a medical educator. As
Dean of Harvard Medical School, he tried unsuccessfully to admit white
women and free black men to the school. Although his greatest fame came
as a man of letters, Holmes considered himself first a physician and
medical educator, and was justifiably proud of his definitive study,
"The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever" (1843). Today, Bowditch and
Holmes are little appreciated as pioneers and reformers, but we remain
in debt to them both.