This was a meeting of the Bird Club which Doctor Holmes attended and the
dingy-linened friends of progress were such men as Dr. Samuel G. Howe,
Governor Washburn, Governor Claflin, Dr. Estes Howe, and Frank B.
Sanborn. It has always been a trick of fashionable society, a trick as
old as the age of Pericles, to disparage liberalism by accusing it of
vulgarity; but we regret to find Doctor Holmes falling into line in this
particular. He always speaks of Sumner in his letters with something like
a slur--not to Motley, for Motley was Sumner's friend, but to others who
might be more sympathetic. This did not, however, prevent him from going
to Sumner in 1868 to ask a favor for his second son, who wanted to be
private secretary to the Senator and learn something of foreign affairs.
Sumner granted the request, although he must have been aware that the
Doctor was not over-friendly to him; but it proved an unfortunate
circumstance for Edward J. Holmes, who contracted malaria in Washington,
and this finally resulted in an early death.

Why is it that members of the medical profession should take an
exceptional interest in poisonous reptiles? Professor Reichert and Dr. S.
Weir Mitchell spent a large portion of their leisure hours for several
years in experimenting with the virus of rattlesnakes, and of the Gila
monster, without, however, quite exhausting the subject. Doctor Holmes
kept a rattlesnake in a cage for a pet, and was accustomed to stir it up
with an ox-goad. A New York doctor lost his life by fooling with a
poisonous snake, and another in Liverpool frightened a whole congregation
of scientists with two torpid rattlesnakes which suddenly came to life on
the president's table. Does it arise from their custom of dealing with
deadly poisons, or is it because they officiate as the high priests of
mortality?

Doctor Holmes's "Elsie Venner" was one of the offshoots of this peculiar