Boylston Prize Dissertations for the Years 1836 and 1837

Boylston Prize Dissertations for the Years 1836 and 1837 collects two of Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.’s early medical essays, both of which won the Boylston Prize, the most prestigious medical writing award offered by Harvard Medical School in the early nineteenth century. The Boylston Prize Dissertations were a recurring competition in which young physicians and medical students submitted essays on assigned medical topics, with the winning entries being published and circulated through the wider American medical community.

Holmes was a remarkable young physician and writer in the 1830s, having graduated from Harvard College in 1829 and from Harvard Medical School in 1836. His winning of two consecutive Boylston Prizes in his late twenties marked him as one of the most promising medical writers of his generation, and the essays in this volume show the careful observational and analytical voice that would later make his more famous Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever and other major medical writings so influential.

The specific topics of the 1836 and 1837 prizes would have been assigned by the Boylston committee, with subjects typically drawn from the contemporary medical concerns of the era. The Holmes essays would have addressed these assigned topics with the kind of careful observational and analytical method that he had been developing through his medical training and his early clinical work. The prose is in the formal nineteenth century scientific style, dense by modern standards but carefully constructed for the educated medical readership that the Boylston competition served.

Holmes would go on to a long career as a physician, as the Parkman Professor of Anatomy at Harvard Medical School, and eventually as the dean of the school. His medical writing across that career remained one of the most influential bodies of nineteenth century American medical literature, with his particular gift for combining rigorous observation with accessible prose making him one of the few medical writers of his era whose work was read both within the profession and by interested general readers.

For historians of American medicine, of nineteenth century Harvard Medical School, or of the wider career of Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., the Boylston Prize Dissertations are early career primary sources of real interest. They show the young Holmes already developing the voice that would carry him through the major medical writings of his later career.