House and Holmes

I’d like to wrap up my Holmes series this week. It seems the history thing has not been too popular with my readers, at least judging by the lack of response to my recent columns. As for Sherlock, I won’t get into the upcoming Robert Downey Junior film, but will point out that the TV evening soap, House, is a cheap knockoff. The protagonist’s quirky personality, his drug habit, his musical instrument fixation, the detective bit…and just in case you didn’t get it, his apartment number 221b happens to be the same as that famous address on Baker Street. At least they got it right bringing him back to his archetypal state, physician.


Why does history bore us? I wanted to tell you how OWH Sr. started a monthly literary magazine that, of course he named, the Atlantic Monthly. His monthly column related conversations from the breakfast table at an inn of his creation. His persona, the Aristocrat one year, the Professor another, would talk with other guests at the inn. The conversations were witty, humorous, and were at times the same stand up routines he had given on his lecture hall tour years earlier. He was really not too different from George Carlin. He just came a century earlier. But who cares? No one, I think, unless you're a really old dude.
It took a most Excellent Adventure for Bill and Ted to get into history. It’s the same for me. I went through my years at Yale without ever taking a history class. I couldn’t read the stuff. History writers can’t write. Three weeks ago on a mountain in Great Barrington, MA I had my own most excellent adventure and discovered history. For me, it’s the same as learning medicine. The reason medical education takes place in the clinical setting is, in large part, that there it becomes alive, is understandable and is remembered. Once you see a case of say, subacute bacterial endocarditis, it becomes real for you and you want to go to the textbooks and read more. And when you read with interest, instead of laboring over the words, you become alert and absorb the material. Do medical writers write better than historians? Keats and Holmes aside, probably not.

I will never forget bacterial endocarditis because of a Delaware VA Hospital patient who came in with shoulder pain and chills. We talked. As it turns out, he lived next to a racetrack and every evening would walk his dog around the stables. Had I ever heard of Streptococcus equi? I’m sure it was in the books I read for cardiac pathology, but come on. After his blood cultures came back full of horse bacteria I went back to those books, learned about that obscure bug, yes, but also learned everything I could about SBE. I may be a gastroenterologist, but I still come across SBE, and get a big kick out of beating the interns, residents, medical attendings and cardiologists to the diagnosis. Our Infectious Disease guys, I admit, get there with or before me.

As Dean of Harvard Medical School, Holmes wanted to admit women. The overseers would not let him. He admitted three blacks, but withdrew the admissions, succumbing to pressure from students and administration. He resigned as Dean but continued to teach until the age of 73. “Life is a fatal complaint,” he said, “and an eminently contagious one.”

“It is a good thing to save a few lives, but it is better to infuse a new life into our language.” So said Holmes as he found new life and went on to worldwide fame as a poet and author. And that’s history. You can read about it, or better yet, do as I did…take a hike! Or do like my father and go birdwatching. (That translates to the racetrack.)

The crack-brained bobolink courts his crazy mate,
Poised on a bulrush tipsy with his weight.