Digital Highlight: John Warren’s Lectures at Harvard Medical School
Partially in the handwriting of Dr. John Warren (1753-1815), this volume of lecture notes on anatomy, beginning in December 1783, is the earliest surviving record of teaching at Harvard Medical School. Warren’s plan for medical study had been adopted by the Harvard Corporation on September 19, 1782, and he became the first faculty member appointed at the Medical School. These lectures were delivered in Harvard Hall, on the Cambridge campus.
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.”
The lecture notes were bequeathed to Harvard in 1928 by Dr. John Warren, the great-grandson of the first Warren. Through the generosity of Dr. Susan C. Lester, Assistant Professor of Pathology, and the Manual of Surgical Pathology Fund at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the volume was recently conserved and then digitized in its entirety and is now available from the HOLLIS catalog at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HMS.COUNT:4435974.