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Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.




Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., ( August 29 , 1809October 7 , 1894 ) was a Physician by profession but achieved fame as a Writer ; he was one of the best regarded American poets of the 19th Century .

He was born in " about the 18th Century battleship USS ''Constitution'' , which was to be broken up for scrap; the poem generated public sentiment that resulted in the historic ship being preserved as a monument. One of his most popular works was '' The Autocrat Of The Breakfast Table ''. He was one of the five members of the group known as the Fireside Poets . He contributed poems and essays to the '' Atlantic Monthly '' from its inception, and also published novels.

His son was Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. He is a descendant of the first American female writer, Anne Bradstreet . His current descendants are the Holmes family of Laurel Springs, Haddonfield, Blackwood, and Audubon, NJ.

In 1846 , in a letter to William T. G. Morton , the Dentist who was the first practitioner to publicly demonstrate the use of Ether during Surgery , Holmes Coin ed the word '' Anæsthesia ''.

He was widely known and admired during his life, so much so that the British author Arthur Conan Doyle named his famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes after him.

Holmes died in Cambridge , Massachusetts , in 1894 , and is buried in that city's Mount Auburn Cemetery .


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