An Address

An Address is one of Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.’s many occasional pieces, a published version of a public lecture or formal address that he gave at one of the various professional, civic, or cultural occasions that filled his long career. Holmes was one of the most popular American public speakers of the mid nineteenth century, with a reputation as a graceful and witty lecturer whose appearances at medical society meetings, college commencements, civic gatherings, and various other public occasions were widely attended and widely reported.

The specific occasion of this address would have shaped both its content and its tone. Holmes addressed audiences across a wide range of contexts, from the highly technical medical society meetings where his major contributions to American medicine were first delivered, through the more general college and university audiences where he spoke on subjects ranging from medical education to literary culture to civic life, to the various memorial and commemorative occasions where he was asked to speak in honor of figures from the wider Boston intellectual community.

Holmes had a real gift for the occasional address. He could combine substantive material with the kind of memorable phrase and elegant structure that the genre rewarded, and his published addresses circulated widely in pamphlet form and in the various collected editions of his work that appeared during his lifetime and after his death. The style of his addresses is in the formal nineteenth century rhetorical mode, but Holmes’s particular gifts kept his prose readable and engaging in ways that much of his contemporaries’ formal speech writing did not always achieve.

Holmes was part of the Boston circle that included Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson, Hawthorne, and the other major figures of mid nineteenth century New England intellectual life. His public role as a speaker and writer extended his medical practice and his Harvard professorship into the wider civic and literary spheres in ways that gave him a unique position in American culture during his lifetime. The Breakfast Table books that made him a household name developed out of the same conversational and reflective voice that his public addresses showcased.

For readers interested in nineteenth century American oratory, in the wider catalogue of Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. beyond his most famous Breakfast Table books and his medical writings, or in the wider Boston intellectual culture of the mid nineteenth century, his published addresses are worth knowing. The address format gives readers a sense of Holmes’s voice in a more public and formal register than his more conversational essays, and the various occasional pieces collected across his complete works show his range as a public intellectual across nearly six decades of American cultural life.