Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Born in Cambridge in 1809, Holmes started at Harvard intending law, switched to medicine, and trained in Paris before earning his MD in 1836. He taught at Dartmouth and later Harvard, where he served as dean and spent decades reforming medical practice — his 1843 essay arguing that doctors carried puerperal fever from patient to patient was controversial but eventually proved correct. He'd been writing poetry since college; "Old Ironsides," published in 1830, helped save the USS Constitution from scrapping. His "Breakfast-Table" series, starting with The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table in 1858…