HOLSTON
HOLSTON
The best biography of Holmes is that by
Morse: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Life and
Letters, 1886.
On Holmes as an anatomist, see:
D. W. Cheever's Oliver Wendell Holmes, the
Anatomist, Harvard Graduates Magazine,
December, 1894, vol. iii.
T. Dwight, Reminiscences of Dr. Holmes as
Professor of Anatomy, Scribner's Magazine,
January, 1S95, vol. xvii.
On Holmes as a physician:
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Johns Hopkins
Bulletin, Oct., 1894, W. Osier.
J. H. Mason Knox, Jr., M. D., The
Medical Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes,
Johns Hopkins Bulletin, February, 1S97,
vol. xviii.
The best bibliography of the works of Holmes
is that of George B. Ives, 1897.
Holston, John G. F. (1809-1874).
He was born in Hamburg, Germany, and his father was also a physician, but the opposition of John's family to his desire to follow the same calling caused him to leave home at an early age. As a cabin-boy he visited Eng- land, the East Indies, China, and other Asiatic countries, finally landing in Philadelphia. The cholera was then raging there and he volunteered as nurse in a cholera hospital, thus ob- taining a first introduction to his pro- fession.
After the epidemic he started on foot to the West, with a companion who robbed and deserted him in the vicinity of Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. Penniless and friendless, he found em- ployment in a brick-yard near Wash- ington college, where his knowledge of Latin and Greek attracted the at- tention of the students, and finally reached the ears of the president, who sent for the needy scholar, and eventu- ally made it possible for him to enter the college, from which he was grad- uated with high honors, and from which later he received the degree of A. M. for his scientific achievements.
He graduated in medicine from Cleve- land College, Ohio, and practised for some years in that State, being called to the chair of surgery in the National Medical College at Washington.
When the Civil War began Dr.
Holston entered the Federal Army
as surgeon of volunteers, and was soon
promoted to the position of medical
director on Grant's staff.
At the close of the war he resumed practice in Zanesville, Ohio, but on the election of Gen. Grant to the presidency, was induced to return to Washington where he was appointed professor of anatomy in Georgetown Medical School, and acted as family physician to the president. Here he died May 1, 1874, after a long and painful illness follow- ing a stroke of paralysis, aged sixty- five.
He married Mary Ann Campbell, by whom he had eight children, the eldest of whom, John G. F. Holston II, and his son, John G. F. Holston III, became doctors also.
Dr. Holston was a man of varied and profound learning, not only in his chosen profession, but in languages, mathematics, astronomy, and the phys- ical sciences. He read and spoke fluently German, French, and Spanish, and had a scholarly acquaintance with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.
One of his biographers has said: "... He labored for the good of others to his personal disadvantage and to the prostration of his body. In the army he rode over the battlefield in person in search of missing men who might have been overlooked by others. This he did at the midnight hour, after toiling to exhaustion in relieving the suffering of men in the hospital. . . . His house was often a hospital for the poor, the homeless, the unfortunate. He fed them from his own table, cloth- ed them at his own expense, he cured them, and sent them forth from his door with the money to start them homewards — if home they had. All this he did without hope of reward — with no other motive than his ever yearning wish to help the needy and distressed."
J. G. F. H.
