Boston medical students trained in Paris in the 1830s repudiated “heroic” practice (bleeding, drugging, purging) in therapeutics. When James Jackson Jr. encountered a supposed miracle treatment—saline injections bringing cholera patients back from the brink of death—he dismissed it as another heroic remedy. Viewed in historical context, that conclusion seems justified.

Oliver Wendell Holmes's The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table is subtitled “Every Man His Own Boswell”: a declaration not only of Holmes's admiration for Samuel Johnson but of his urgent sense of Johnson's London circle as embodying intellectual values still sadly lacking in an America ruled by crude economic individualism.