Study in Paris, successful research work, practice in Boston, and a year's teaching at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire led to an appointment on the medical faculty at Harvard which he held actively from 1847 to 1882 and as emeritus until his death. As a practitioner he was not remarkably successful. At the first his extremely youthful appearance and his jocosity of manner stood in the way. People could not be expected to flock to the office of a young man who was known to have said that "all small fevers would be gratefully received." And later his interest in things literary was regarded with distrust by prospective patients. As a teacher, on the other hand, he was unusually effective because of the traits which made him a poor business-getter. He was vivacious and deft in his methods. He knew how to put his ideas in order, he was a master hand at expounding them, and he was ingenious in providing neat formulas for memorizing the myriad details of physiology and anatomy. His profession supplied Holmes with a background of thought which was different from any of his contemporaries. It supplied him with titles and whole poems, such as "Nux Postcoenatica," "The Stethoscope Song," and "The Mysterious Illness," with literary essays, such as "The Physiology of Versification," and with a whole volume of medical essays. It furnished the motives for his three "medicated novels,"--prenatal influence in "Elsie Venner," physical magnetism (by its opposite) in "A Mortal Antipathy," and telepathy in "The Guardian Angel." It was the basis for scores of passages and hundreds of allusions in the four volumes of the "Breakfast Table" series. And, furthermore, in the natural sympathy which it generated in him for every branch of progressive science it gave ground for the felicitous toast:[28] "The union of Science and Literature--a happy marriage, the fruits of which are nowhere seen to better advantage than in our American Holmes." This is not to say that Holmes was alone in his consciousness of science. Thoreau was fully as aware of it in the field of plant and animal study; all things considered, Emerson and Whitman were more responsive to its deeper spiritual implications. It is rather that Holmes had his special avenue of approach through the lore of the physician. [28] Meeting of the American Medical Association, May, 1853. The response was a poem.