Putnam C E
The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, London, United Kingdom.
Acta Physiol Hung. 2001;88(2):155-72. doi: 10.1556/APhysiol.88.2001.2.8.
The 19th-century American physician Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) is known, internationally, more for his literary output than for his contributions to medical science. Yet a single paper he wrote in 1843--"The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever"--has made him a hero in the eyes of many (especially in the United States) of the struggle against that scourge. Why that one article, written when Holmes was still in his thirties, should--even in its expanded 1855 version--so routinely be referred to as a "classic of medical literature", and why its author should have been raised on such a high pedestal that some grant him a position beside Ignác Semmelweis, are complicated questions. This present paper is an attempt to begin assessing what it is that makes someone a medical hero by looking at three different aspects of Holmes's early career. He was even as a young man a poet and a physiologist/anatomist as well as the author of this important essay. Whether and how those three features of Holmes's many-sides public persona are connected is discussed as a prelude to considering whether his work on puerperal fever legitimates his status as a medical hero.
19世纪的美国医生奥利弗·温德尔·霍姆斯（1809 - 1894）在国际上，因其文学作品而非对医学科学的贡献更为人所知。然而，他在1843年撰写的一篇论文——《产褥热的传染性》——使他在许多人（尤其是在美国）眼中成为了抗击这一灾祸的英雄。为何这篇霍姆斯三十多岁时撰写的文章，即使是在1855年扩充版中，仍常被视为“医学文献经典”，以及为何其作者会被置于如此高的地位，以至于有人将他与伊格纳兹·塞麦尔维斯相提并论，这些都是复杂的问题。本文试图通过审视霍姆斯早期职业生涯的三个不同方面，来初步评估是什么使一个人成为医学英雄。他年轻时既是诗人、生理学家/解剖学家，也是这篇重要论文的作者。在探讨他关于产褥热的研究是否使其作为医学英雄的地位合理之前，先讨论了霍姆斯多面公众形象的这三个特征是否以及如何相互关联。
