Project Gutenberg's A Mortal Antipathy, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

[The Physician and Poet, not his son the Jurist O. W. Holmes, Jr.]

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Title: A Mortal Antipathy

Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Release Date: August 16, 2006 [EBook #2698]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by David Widger

A MORTAL ANTIPATHY

By Oliver Wendell Holmes

PREFACE.

"A MORTAL ANTIPATHY" was a truly hazardous experiment. A very wise and
very distinguished physician who is as much at home in literature as he
is in science and the practice of medicine, wrote to me in referring
to this story: "I should have been afraid of my subject." He did
not explain himself, but I can easily understand that he felt the
improbability of the physiological or pathological occurrence on which
the story is founded to be so great that the narrative could hardly be
rendered plausible. I felt the difficulty for myself as well as for my
readers, and it was only by recalling for our consideration a series of
extraordinary but well-authenticated facts of somewhat similar character
that I could hope to gain any serious attention to so strange a
narrative.

I need not recur to these wonderful stories. There is, however, one, not
to be found on record elsewhere, to which I would especially call the
reader's attention. It is that of the middle-aged man, who assured
me that he could never pass a tall hall clock without an indefinable
terror. While an infant in arms the heavy weight of one of these tall
clocks had fallen with aloud crash and produced an impression on his
nervous system which he had never got over.

The lasting effect of a shock received by the sense of sight or that of
hearing is conceivable enough.

But there is another sense, the nerves of which are in close
relation with the higher organs of consciousness. The strength of the
associations connected with the function of the first pair of nerves,
the olfactory, is familiar to most persons in their own experience and
as related by others. Now we know that every human being, as well as
every other living organism, carries its o