In Memoriam: Yale Professor Frederic Lawrence Holmes Pioneered History of Science Program at Yale

Frederic Lawrence Holmes, Avalon Professor of the History of Medicine at Yale School of Medicine and a world authority on the history of science and medicine, died March 27 after a long illness.

Holmes was chair of the Section of History of Medicine at the medical school from 1977 to 2002. He was a gentle and generous teacher and colleague and a formidable historian whose many publications in the history of the life sciences made him an internationally eminent figure in the history of science and medicine.

Holmes was born in Cincinnati in 1932. He received his B.S. degree in quantitative biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1954 and took special satisfaction from rowing for MIT at the Henley Regatta. He then began graduate work in the Department of History at Harvard, study interrupted by two years in the Air Force. He received his M.A. degree in history in 1958, but on returning to Harvard he transferred to the Department of the History of Science, where he received the Ph.D. degree in 1962 with a dissertation on Claude Bernard and the Concept of the Internal Environment.

In 1964, after two years of teaching at MIT, he became an assistant professor in Yale’s Department of the History of Science and Medicine, and in 1968 was promoted to associate professor. He left in 1972 to become professor and department chair at the University of Western Ontario. He remained there until 1977, when he returned to Yale as a full professor and chair of the Section of the History of Medicine in the School of Medicine. He became Avalon Professor in 1985, and from 1982 to 1987 was Master of Jonathan Edwards College.

Among his major studies on the history of life sciences are: “Claude Bernard and Animal Chemistry,” (1974); “Lavoisier and the Chemistry of Life,” (1985); “Hans Krebs: The Formation of a Scientific Life, 1900-1933,” (1991); “Hans Krebs: Architect of Intermediary Metabolism, 1933-1937,” (1993); “Antoine Lavoisier The Next Crucial Year: Or, The Sources of His Quantitative Method in Chemistry,” (1997); and “Meselsohn, Stahl, and the Replication of DNA: A History of The Most Beautiful Experiment in Biology” (2001). His historical studies of scientific creativity have helped define the field of the history of science and medicine, which he has led both by his contributions to historical understanding and by his scholarly example and mentorship of graduate students and junior colleagues.

He was awarded the History of Science Society’s Schumann Prize (1962), Pfizer Prize (1975), and Sarton Medal (2000); the American Association for the History of Medicine’s Welch Medal (1978); and the American Chemical Society’s Dexter Award (1994). He was president of the History of Science Society in 1981-1983, and became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994 and a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2000.

As chair of the Section of the History of Medicine for 23 years, Holmes was a leading force in building at Yale the history of science and history of medicine, both as a scholarly field and as a link between the humanities, natural sciences, and medicine. Soon after his return to Yale, he established, in collaboration with the Department of History, an undergraduate major in History of Science, History of Medicine in Yale College. Under his deft leadership, the section in 1986 inaugurated a graduate program in the History of Medicine and the Life Sciences. Owing in large measure to Holmes’ passionate advocacy, in 2002 the Provost established a newly constituted Program in the History of Medicine and Science, anchored co-equally in the Section of the History of Medicine and in the Department of History - an intellectual and institutional bridge between the School of Medicine and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

When Holmes learned of his illness about a year ago, he moved to half-time phased retirement and poured himself into work on two major projects. Last spring he decided to stand back from his focused case studies of scientific creativity to venture generalizations about the nature of the scientific enterprise, past and present. His early draft manuscript was the foundation for a symposium honoring Holmes, held at the medical school, in September 2002. His book, along with expanded versions of comments made on his draft at that event, will be published in spring 2004 by the Yale University Press as “Investigative Pathways: Patterns and Stages in the Careers of Experimental Scientists.”

During the final months of his life Holmes was intent on attempting to finish his ongoing study of Seymour Benzer and the history of molecular biology. Those who visited him at Yale Health Services recall a room filled with books, papers, a laptop, and a scholar eager to talk about ideas. Holmes finished the final chapter two weeks before his death, and “Between Molecular Biology and the Classical Gene: The Pathway of Seymour Benzer into the rII Region” is now with Yale University Press.

Holmes’ wife of many decades, Harriet Vann Holmes, passed away in 2000. He is survived by daughters Susan Holmes of Belgrade, Maine; Rebecca Holmes of Bethany, Conn., and Catherine Kirby of Branford, Conn.; by grandchildren Lucy, Vann, and Martin Guarnieri; by a brother, John C. Holmes of Arlington, Va.; by a sister, Nancy Sen of New York City, and by his partner, Petra Gentz-Werner of Berlin, Germany.

Condolences may be sent to the Holmes family at 44 Bethridge Road, Bethany, Conn., 06524. The Holmes family has asked that contributions to memorialize Holmes be made to the Beaumont Medical Club (c/o Section of the History of Medicine) designated for the Frederic Holmes Lectureship Fund, which was established last year in his honor, or to Walnut Hills High School, Cincinnati, Ohio.

A memorial service celebrating his life and work will be held on Friday, April 11, 2003, at 5 p.m. in the Historical Medical Library, Sterling Hall of Medicine, 333 Cedar Street, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Conn. A reception will follow in the Beaumont Room, Sterling Hall of Medicine.