undergraduate recitations, each class having its fixed habitat. The west door, much reduced in size, was protected by a crenellated porch, vaguely supposed to be in a fitting Gothic style. The eastern half of the edifice was allotted to the Medical School. On the lower floor were two rooms used respectively as a “Chemistry Room” and a “Physic Room.” (The original lectures in chemistry and materia medica seem to have been given in the basement of Harvard, which was found “unhealthy and inconvenient.”) On the upper floor was the anatomical lecture-room, with curved ranks of rising benches.[1] All this, including the necessary passageways, was accomplished in a building whose interior dimensions were only 46 by 30 feet![2] It is somewhat startling to consider that scarcely more than a century ago the sum total of the instruction both for the College and for its one professional school was comfortably given in such a diminutive structure. As a wag of the day remarked, the chapel was Holden’ the entire University.[3]
In 1810 it was decided to remove the Medical School to Boston; but Dr. Warren’s lectures had proved so
- ↑ Harrington, History of the Harvard Medical School, i, 288. Corporation vote of September 17, 1800.
- ↑ See the valuable set of plans (from which the illustration is taken) in the Map Room of the Widener Library.
- ↑ Reminiscences of Edward Everett (H. C. 1811), before the Alumni Association, 1852. Quoted in Harvard Register, iii, 83.
