Luther, after successive education at home with his father's pupils, at a private school in Birmingham, and at Havre in 1827, where he made rapid progress in French, entered St. Bartholomew's Hospital in 1831.

He was surgeon to the Metropolitan Dispensary, Fore Street, from 1843, living in the Old Jewry and teaching anatomy to private pupils, among whom was William Palmer, the poisoner.

Holden was one of the twenty-four successful candidates at the first examination for the newly established order of fellows of the College of Surgeons (24 December 1844).

Appointed in 1846 with A. M. McWhinnie superintendent of dissections (or demonstrator) at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, he was elected in 1859 jointly with Frederick Skey to lecture upon descriptive and surgical anatomy.

He then resigned his hospital appointments on attaining the age of sixty-five, and retiring from his house in Gower Street to Pinetoft, Rushmere, near Ipswich, he thenceforth spent much time in travel, visiting Egypt, Australia, India and Japan.

A three-quarter length portrait—an admirable likeness—in oils, by Sir J. E. Millais, R.A., presented on Holden's retirement, hangs in the great hall at St. Bartholomew's Hospital.

An unpublished paper by him, 'On the Mechanism of the Hip Joint,' read at the Abernethian Society at St. Bartholomew's Hospital (24 Nov. 1850), exerted much influence.

It dealt with the effect of atmospheric pressure in retaining the ball-shaped head of the femur within the socket of the acetabulum, and with the importance of keeping the anterior part of the capsular ligament in the erect attitude.

Holden published: 'Manual of the Dissection of the Human Body,' a book enjoying a large circulation, 1850, 4 pts.

1899; this work marked a distinct advance in the study of the human skeleton; the illustrations by Holden and etched on stone by Thomas Godart, librarian of the medical school of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, are of the highest order; they formed at the time a new feature in the teaching of anatomy, for the origins and insertions of the muscles were shown upon the figures of the bones in red and blue lines.