Currents and Counter-Currents in Medical Science

Currents and Counter Currents in Medical Science is one of Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.’s major medical addresses, originally delivered at the Massachusetts Medical Society in 1860 and subsequently published as a pamphlet that circulated widely in the American medical community. Holmes was a working physician and a professor at Harvard Medical School in addition to his career as a popular essayist and poet, and his medical addresses represent some of the most influential American medical writing of the mid nineteenth century.

The central argument of the address is one of Holmes’s recurring themes across his medical career. He argued that a great deal of nineteenth century medical practice was actually doing more harm than good, with the various therapies that physicians of the era prescribed often producing worse outcomes than would have resulted from leaving the patient alone. Holmes was particularly critical of the heavy use of bleeding, purging, and drugging that characterized much of the medicine of his time, and he argued for a more cautious and observational approach that would let the body’s own healing processes work without active interference. His famous observation that if all of the medicines used by his profession could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes, comes from this address.

The argument was controversial in its day and earned Holmes considerable criticism from colleagues who took the implication that they were actively harming their patients personally. Modern medicine has largely vindicated Holmes’s skepticism about the therapeutic enthusiasms of nineteenth century practice, though the wider question of how to balance medical caution against the impulse to do something for a suffering patient remains as live in our own era as it was in his.

Holmes’s prose in his medical addresses is in the formal nineteenth century style but reads more accessibly than much of the medical writing of the period. He had a real gift for the memorable phrase and for the kind of arresting comparison that lets a complicated medical idea land with general readers. The address rewards reading both for its specific medical history and for its wider implications about how to think about medical practice across any era.

For historians of medicine, Holmes is one of the central American figures of the nineteenth century, and this address is a primary source of real importance. For general readers interested in the development of modern medical thinking, the pamphlet is a valuable read.