Immediately following the demonstration, in a congratulatory letter to Dr. William Thomas Green Morton, polymath and later Harvard Medical School Dean, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., father of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. of the Supreme Court of the United States, proposed naming the state produced "anesthesia", and the procedure an "anesthetic." Holmes wrote to Morton, "Everybody wants to have a hand in a great discovery. All I will do is to give a hint or two as to names—or the name—to be applied to the state produced and the agent. The state should, I think, be called 'Anaesthesia.' This signifies insensibility—more particularly ... to objects of touch." Holmes added poetically that the new term "will be repeated by the "tongues" of every civilized of mankind."