The life of Oliver Wendell Holmes was selected as the subject for a lecture in the 1974 History of Medicine series at Yale University School of Medicine because, as the Latin subtitle of the essay suggests, he represents a fortunate and uncommon, but by no means unique, synthesis of the practical and aesthetic, of science and the humanities. An attempt has been made by the lecturer, employing frequent, but brief, excerpts from the works of several disinguished biographers as well as Doctor Holmes' own lectures, medical papers, essays and poems to delineate the elite heritage and the events that led this complex person transiently into the sudy of law, the profession in which his older son reached the pinnacle of the U.S. Supreme Court, and finally into medicine where a short period of private practice was followed by more than three decades of distinguished teaching is anatomy. His lifetime (1809-1894) spanned most of the nineteenth century, in the literary hisory of which he played a significant role. His writings reveal a remarkable, and sometimes prophetic, appreciation of the impact that burgeoning science and evolving social pressures and changes would have on the teaching and practice of medicine in the future-our present.