First Lectures

Admission ticket to the lectures on anatomy and surgery for Robert Thaxter, 1797. The use of admission tickets for each course of a medical student's education was common until the late 19th century. Students paid the professor or lecturer directly and were then issued these passes for an academic session.

Warren’s original lectures were delivered in Holden Chapel in Cambridge, and he demonstrated anatomical dissection utilizing “recent subjects if they can be procured, if not, on preparations, duly adapted to the purpose.” At this period, the legal provision of anatomical material for study in Massachusetts was limited to the bodies of criminals executed for murder and those who had died after engaging in duelling, and the acquisition of bodies by illegal means—grave-robbing—was a common practice. The difficulty of obtaining an adequate supply of human remains for dissection and medical study would remain a problem well into the 20th century.

Lectures upon anatomy, 1783-1785

Partially in the handwriting of Dr. John Warren, this volume of lecture notes, beginning on December 10, 1783, contains the earliest surviving record of teaching at Harvard Medical School. The lectures were delivered in Harvard Hall, on the campus in Cambridge.

After summarizing the history of his subject, Dr. Warren then justifies dissection as an essential component to anatomical study: "At the first view of dissections, the stomach is apt to turn, but custom wears off such impressions. It is anatomy that directs the knife in the hand of a skilful surgeon, & shews him where he may perform any necessary operation with safety to the patient. It is this which enables the physician to form an accurate knowledge of diseases & open dead bodies with grace, to discover the cause or seat of the disease, & the alteration it may have made in the several parts."

"Address to students in physic," Boston Magazine, 1785

Two years after the opening the Medical School, this account, published by the Harvard Corporation in the Boston magazine, described the progress of the new institution. Anatomical study under John Warren was one of the foundations of the curriculum, and, by 1785, the Corporation could report that "a number of very valuable natural preparations of the whole, as well as of the several parts of the human body, are procured, and frequent additions are making to the anatomical apparatus: these, together with the actual dissection of recent subjects, for which a convenient theatre is erected, furnish ample means for acquiring an accurate knowledge of the structure of the human body, and of the animal oeconomy."