The Bone Garden: A Novel

AUTHOR'S NOTE

In March 1833, Oliver Wendell Holmes left Boston and sailed to France, where he would spend the next two years completing his medical studies. At the renowned École de Médicine in Paris, young Holmes had access to an unlimited number of anatomical specimens, and he studied under some of the finest medical and scientific minds in the world. He returned to Boston a far more accomplished physician than most of his American peers.

In 1843, at the Boston Society for Medical Improvement, he presented a paper titled — The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever. — It would prove to be his greatest contribution to American medicine. It introduced a new practice that now seems obvious, but which, in Holmes's day, was a radical new idea. Countless lives were saved, and miseries avoided, by his simple yet revolutionary suggestion: that physicians should simply wash their hands.