]]> Because the coroner of one county had taken a Harvard six-day course on the handling of disasters involving dead bodies in great numbers, he was able to cope with a major disaster that happened in his county ten days later. A little more than a week after his return home, an explosion of gas burned out many blocks in his city. Scores of people were killed. But even in the short space of time since his return, he had put into effect some of the ideas that had been recommended to him at Harvard. Places for the laying out of large numbers of bodies had been decided upon. Tags giving all available information about such bodies when there were picked up were ready to attach to them. Arrangements had been made for trucks to supplement the regular ambulances.
]]> [Boston, Mass.?], December 5, 1849. Page 01-03.
]]> The fall 1945 seminar in homicide investigation for police officers was the first to incorporate examination of the Nutshell Models as part of the curriculum. The homicide investigation seminars were held in the spring and fall each year, in the Magrath Library. Mrs. Lee sponsored and presided over the homicide seminars until 1961, and the last to be held at Harvard was in May 1967.
In 1946, students who had taken the police homicide course organized themselves into the Harvard Associates in Police Science and made Mrs. Lee the group’s first president. HAPS is an active organization, based in Baltimore, and continues to sponsor the annual Frances Glessner Lee Seminar in Homicide Investigation.
]]> ]]> My greatest problem to date has been to arrive at some more or less definite idea as to what a department of legal medicine at Harvard University should be…. Some of the medical aspects of scientific criminal investigation are common to all of the departments that I know anything about but otherwise the variation is great…. The expert in legal medicine should be responsible for all aspects of medical science ranging from medical jurisprudence through scientific criminal investigation, public health, industrial hygiene and psychiatry to medical penology. Such centralization of all branches of medical knowledge useful to the law in one department, called legal medicine, may be convenient to the administrators of the law but it is so impracticable from a scientific standpoint as to defeat the original purpose.
The uncertainty about the scope and varied nature of the legal medicine endeavor would prove an ongoing problem for the Medical School’s administration, the department’s personnel, and Mrs. Lee.
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Because the coroner of one county had taken a Harvard six-day course on the handling of disasters involving dead bodies in great numbers, he was able to cope with a major disaster that happened in his county ten days later. A little more than a week after his return home, an explosion of gas burned out many blocks in his city. Scores of people were killed. But even in the short space of time since his return, he had put into effect some of the ideas that had been recommended to him at Harvard. Places for the laying out of large numbers of bodies had been decided upon. Tags giving all available information about such bodies when there were picked up were ready to attach to them. Arrangements had been made for trucks to supplement the regular ambulances.
]]> ]]> ]]> Genetic Engineering
Gene Therapy
]]> Articles
Scientific Misconduct]]> Medical colleges
Minorities--Education]]> Tumors
Epithelial cells]]> Cancer--treatment
Tumors]]> Cancer
]]> Cancer
Virology]]> A state almshouse for paupers at Tewksbury was founded in 1852. In the 1880s, charges of theft and abuse of the inmates–including the sale of bodies of the deceased to Harvard and other medical schools for anatomical dissection–were leveled against the caretakers. Governor Butler, in his testimony before the Investigation Committee, stated, "The defence brought three or four of these people here to swear that nobody ever dissected a body there, and nobody ever desired to so do. That is entirely contradicted now by the testimony of four or five witnesses. They said also that there never was but one body at a time in that dead-house. They swore that–two at the most. I had two men here yesterday–entirely outside men–who said they saw dead bodies, ten on the tables, and in the dead-room twelve to twenty more piled up like cordwood, higgledy-piggledy, the dead infants between the adults' legs."

Butler's accusations and a considerable public outcry derived, in part, from the testimony of Dr. John Dixwell (1848-1931), an 1873 graduate of the Medical School. According to an article printed in the Lowell weekly sun for March 31, 1883, Dixwell testified before the Committee on Public Charitable Institutions that, "During the three years he saw and knew of several hundred bodies of infants, each year, being brought to the school for dissection. They were brought there in trunks, in a country team, and were deposited in a little anteroom on crates or shelves until the students were ready to use them. The students obtained the bodies by applying to

]]> Argument before the Tewksbury Investigation Committee by Governor Benj. F. Butler, upon facts disclosed during the recent investigation, July 15, 1883, including illustrations]]> Aesculapiad]]> First-year medical students, DeWitt Allen Green, Ernest Bingham Oliver, Harold Bengloff, and Bruce Robinson Merrill, produced these drawings as part of their assigned course work on a cadaver in the fall of 1934.

According to the description in Medical School's catalogue from that year, "In the study of gross anatomy, students make a complete dissection of one half of the human body, and all of the class dissect the same part at the same time. Four men will be assigned to the same subject, and will work together during the course. The study of the skeleton is carried on with the dissection, and each student will be provided with a box of bones which may be kept throughout the course. There will be lectures or demonstrations which are arranged to correspond as closely as possible with the work in the dissecting room. These lectures not only will serve as a guide to the regular work in the dissecting room, but also will be used to emphasize those details of human anatomy which the student cannot easily study for himself in his own dissection."

]]> Histochemical and cytological techniques]]> The Department of Anatomy produced and distributed this step-by-step manual for dissection "to help the student in the important task of displaying for study the structure of the human body. It represents one plan for completing each day's work with a minimum of wasted effort, or of accidental damage to important structures."

This copy was used and heavily annotated by Robert Paul Davis (1929-2005), a graduate of the Class of 1951 during his first-year studies in 1948.

]]> Soon after his appointment as Dean of Harvard Medical School, though before he assumed that office, Robert Higgins Ebert (1914-1996) delivered this address at Vassar, at that time still a women's college. Ebert states, "I believe in education for women, and I believe in equal opportunities for women in the learned professions as well as some which are not so learned. I believe that women can do everything that men can do as well as one or two things which in spite [of] considerable ingenuity men have never quite been able to accomplish."

The associated report on the speech is reproduced from a student newspaper, the Vassar miscellany.

A large collection of Dr. Ebert's professional and personal papers, as well as archival records from his tenure as Dean of the Harvard Medical School, are all preserved in the Countway and available through its Center for the History of Medicine.

]]> ]]> Indoors and Out, v. 3 (November 1906)]]> The Harvard Medical School, 1782-1906]]> The Aesculapiad, the yearbook for Harvard Medical School, first appeared in 1924, but it had this unique precursor in 1906, in conjunction with the opening of the new buildings. The yearbook contains photographs of the faculty and the 68 graduating students who received medical degrees at Commencement on June 27, 1906. It includes views of the old and new buildings and some local landmarks, such as the F. H. Thomas Company on Boylston Street, where the students could acquire medical books and supplies. Dr. William B. Bartlett of the Class of 1906 also used this yearbook to record notes on his 25th and 45th reunions.]]> The Medical School of Harvard University, Class of 1906 showing the old Harvard Medical School buildings and two pictures of the Longwood campus under construction]]> "In these new buildings all that one could ask for has been provided, both for medical education and for scientific investigation and research. Here we have, as the President of the University stated, on another occasion, 'the means for a new start for medical education and research in our country' …. In taking possession of these new buildings the Faculty feels a great responsibility and can only express the hope that the future history of the School will show that the Faculty has been faithful to the trust this day committed to it."]]> "something will be finished … so we are going ahead. We have had good weather & much progress is being made & I have taken many individual members of the Faculty out to the buildings, so now our long period of incubation seems coming to a close."]]> Laudate Dominum : Motett for Male Chorus accompanied by Organ, Two Trumpets, Four Trombones, which was composed for the dedication of the new Medical School buildings in 1906]]> The Varieties of Religious Experience(1902)—received a degree from Harvard Medical School in 1869 and taught physiology during the 1870s. This notebook was used by James as a Harvard student just after the Civil War, as he attended the lectures of Henry J. Bigelow, Henry I. Bowditch, and other members of the medical faculty.

In a letter from this period to his sister, Alice, James claimed he had just attended a lecture “which I could not understand a word of, but rather enjoyed the sensation of listening to for an hour.” Here William James—though his attention is clearly wandering—has taken notes on the lectures of Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard on writer’s palsy and other diseases of the nervous system.

]]> The faculty was also concerned about the cost of medical education associated with the move and stated, “It is believed that the price of living in Boston will not greatly exceed that in country towns, at least to those, who are willing to make some temporary sacrifices to the acquisition of knowledge, which will be permanently profitable to them. The professors will be able to point out houses, where the students may be lodged and boarded for $3.50 or $3 for a week. They will also endeavour to render the situation of the students comfortable, and to promote their improvement in medical learning, by every means in their power.”

]]> The Independent Chronicle and the Universal Advertiser concerning the appointment of faculty and curriculum at Harvard Medical School]]> catalog record]]> catalog record]]> ]]> “My mode of life is rather solitary than social, though I have contributed my share of hilarity to scores of festivals and am almost entitled to be called the laureate of our local receptions of great personages …. I have long ceased to practice, but keep my professorship in the Medical School of Harvard University which occupies and amuses me for seven months of the year. I go to a dinner party once in a while and once a month to the Saturday Club where I meet Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, and in other years used to meet Agassiz, Sumner, Motley, Hawthorne, and many others of more or less name and note…. But I find my sympathies not less active because I live a good deal out of the world and because I find myself so much at home among what are called elderly people—not, of course, recognizing myself as one of them…. It is the best reward of authorship to be greeted in terms of friendship, nay, something like affection by those whom our words have cheered, comforted, consoled, strengthened, stimulated, if not instructed.”]]> “I considered the task more than difficult…. The difference in the estimate of his writings is so great that any analysis of them with comments, interpretations, judgments, must fail to satisfy some, must exceed the estimate of others. I tried to be fair; I endeavored to follow as well as I might the course of Emerson’s thoughts and to reach as far as in me lay the inner nature of the man. On the whole I have been satisfied with the verdicts passed upon my book.”]]> Medical Improvement
]]> "These will be given by Dr. Holmes, weekly, through the Spring months…. They will illustrate by recent specimens, and a large number of carefully selected English and French preparations, the leading facts of animal and vegetable structure and development, and will be enforced by practical tests of the students' knowledge."]]> and transferred to the Library of Harvard Medical School
]]> “A study of the faces here presented certainly suggests the conclusion that there must be some racial peculiarities showing themselves in the composite portraits. The two composites of each race are clearly more like each other than like those of the other race, and the squarely cut jaw and brow of the Wend composites give the impression of greater vigor and strength of character than the more rounded features of the Saxons.”

Galton admired these composites; some years after Bowditch’s death, they were also displayed at the exhibition at the Second International Congress of Eugenics in 1921.

]]> McClure’s magazine in September 1894. Of them he says, “A study of the faces here presented certainly suggests the conclusion that there must be some racial peculiarities showing themselves in the composite portraits. The two composites of each race are clearly more like each other than like those of the other race, and the squarely cut jaw and brow of the Wend composites give the impression of greater vigor and strength of character than the more rounded features of the Saxons.”

Galton admired these composites; some years after Bowditch’s death, they were also displayed at the exhibition at the Second International Congress of Eugenics in 1921.

]]> ]]> Joseph E. Murray Papers in the Center for the History of Medicine.]]> ]]> The Mary Ellen Avery papers, 1929-2002, consist of personal and professional correspondence, teaching materials, professional activities records, grant records, articles and drafts, lectures and speeches, diaries, photographs, and other records from Avery’s life and career as a pediatrician in: Boston, Massachusetts; Montreal, Quebec; and Baltimore, Maryland and as a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. Correspondence includes letters of recommendation, reports from meetings, and committee and travel correspondence. Professional records consist of correspondence, reports, patient records, notes, newspaper clippings, committee materials, and other records chronicling Avery’s involvement and interactions with professional organizations, committees, publications, and institutions, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Joint Program in Neonatology, the American Pediatric Society, and Physicians for Social Responsibility. Professional records also contain correspondence and reports from the Joint Program in Neonatology, Children’s Hospital, Boston, Montreal Children’s Hospital, and Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore. Grants records consist of applications, renewal forms, correspondence, budgets, reports, and other materials related to grants from the National Institutes of Health and Specialized Centers of Research that Avery was involved with, as well as correspondence with the National Tuberculosis Association. Lectures and teaching records contain speech drafts, correspondence, syllabi, and notes from Avery’s travels around the world as a guest lecturer and as a professor at Harvard Medical School. Writings and subject files consist of drafts and reprints of writings by Avery on such topics as respiratory distress syndrome, hyaline membrane disease, bronchopulmonary dysplasia, and oral rehydration. Personal records include diaries, calendars, photographs, and certificates and awards.

]]> This item serves to unite all digital objects in the Mary Ellen Avery papers currently available in Omeka. To view the full finding aid, click here.

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