Dean
This letter from Holmes’ tenure as dean of Harvard Medical School relates to the education of two African-American students, Daniel Laing, Jr., and Isaac H. Snowden. The Massachusetts Colonization Society promoted the education of Laing and Snowden, planning to send them out to practice in the Republic of Liberia.
Here, at Brooks’ appeal, Holmes waives the lecture fees for Laing (“his habits of study good & his talents most promising”). Snowden’s fees were assumed by the Colonization Society.
Laing, Snowden and a third student, Martin Robison Delany, enrolled during the winter term in 1850 but were forced to withdraw following a protest by some of the Medical School students. Both Laing and Snowden went on to pursue medical studies at Dartmouth.
During the 19th century, every incoming medical student signed this volume at the beginning of the academic session and so agreed to follow the statutes of Harvard University and the direction of the Faculty of Medicine. On the page on the right can be seen the signature of Daniel Laing, Jr.
In 1848, after millworker Sarah H. Furber died following an abortion, physician John McNab (1783-1878) brought her body to Boston and offered to sell it to Holmes as a subject for dissection at the Medical School. The offer was refused, but Holmes and J. B. S. Jackson were subsequently asked to make a postmortem examination of the body, and Holmes was called in to testify during the course of the McNab trial. The Medical School’s steward, Ephraim Littlefield, was examined about his role in the McNab incident. Both Holmes and Littlefield were also called to the witness stand during the infamous murder trial of Dr. John White Webster in 1850.
John McNab later went on to be president of the White Mountain Medical Society and the New Hampshire Medical Society.