Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 April 1895 — Applauded Too Soon. [ARTICLE]

Applauded Too Soon.

Dr. Holmes was a master of the art of so arranging a discourse as to take his hearers by surprise. What they did not anticipate from his lips happened to fall from them. On one memorable occasion they were struck with astonishment as they found themselves in a rhetorical ambush, lured by the verbal skill of the master. The occasion was the opening of the new building of the Harvard Medical School in the autumm of 1883, when Dr. Holmes delivered a lecture before the faculty and government of the college and a large audience. In the January Scribner’s Dr. Thomas Dwight describes the scene, wherein all the audience were astonished, and a part mentally paralyzed. The question of admitting women to the medical school had been debated, and the new movement had been defeated, through the opposition of a great majority of the faculty. Dr. Holmes had inclined to the losing side. On this occasion, after speaking in his most perfect style on woman as a nurse, he concluded:

“I have always felt that this was rather the vocation of woman than general medical, and especially surgical, practice.” This was the signal for loud applause from the conservative side. When he could resume he went on: “Yet I, myself, followed the course of lectures given by the young Madame Lachapelle in Paris, and if here and there an Intrepid woman insists on taking by storm the fortress of medical education, I would have the gate flung open to her, as if it were that of the citadel of Orleans, and she were Joan of Arc returning from the field of victory.” The enthusiasm which this sentiment called forth was so overwhelming that those of us who had led the first applause felt, perhaps looked, rather foolish. I have since suspected that Dr. Holmes, who always knew his audience, had kept back the real climax to lure us to our destruction.