Elsie Venner

Oliver Wendell Holmes confronts humanity's original sin in this medical case study-cum-romance

Elsie Venner is your typical teenage girl. But unlike her classmates at the Apollinean Female Institute, her mother was bitten by a rattlesnake while pregnant. Not girl, not yet a woman and also not quite human, Elsie must battle a conflicted nature while suffering the advances of lovers, teachers, doctors and ministers, all intent on conquering and curing her. Elsie Venner was one of three "medicated novels" written by physician and author Oliver Wendell Holmes. In this work, he coined the phrase "Boston Brahmin," and dissected the eccentricities and hypocrisies of his local culture. Published after Darwin's On the Origin of Species and before Freud's Studies on Hysteria, Elsie Venner is a scientific mystery that undresses Puritanism and anticipates psychoanalysis. This Mandylion edition includes the publisher's signature visual glossary that illuminates the world of 19th-century society, science and medicine.

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-94) was an American physician, writer and public intellectual. He established a medical practice in Boston and served as a professor and dean at Harvard Medical School, while also cofounding the Atlantic Monthly, a magazine he named. His son, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., served as an associate justice of the US Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932.