Elsie Venner Oliver Wendell Holmes

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.