SPRING RECALLS ANCIENT MIDNIGHT RAIDS ON CHAPEL MEDICAL MUSEUM

In 1783 when with the founding of the Medical School. Harvard blossomed forth from a college into a true university, the question of a site for the new school became a burning question. To the eagle eye on Dr. John Warren of the class of 1771 through whose unwearied efforts the school had become possible the risen tiers of seats in Holden Chapel offered the nearest approach to an operating amphitheater obtainable in those lays. Thus after having served the purposes of church state, and army, Madame Holden's gift came next into the service of medicine.

It was here for nearly 30 years that Warren, Dexter and Waterhouse gave their famous courses. Here, with attentive gaze fixed on the dissecting knife, sat Nathan Smith 1790, James Jackson 1791 and others who later became the are most practitioners of the time.

But the school did not seem to be popcorn. To remedy this the lectures were discolored open to Seniors who had obtained the consent of their parents, "and not a few," says Mr. Samuel F. Batchelor 93 in his "Bits of Harvard History," with the morbid curiosity of youth failed themselves of this gruesome privege."

The few simple anatomical specimens collected in the Chapel soom became one of the greatest sights of the College, producing "the liveliest emotions among visitors most of whom had no idea that their insides were so fearfully and wonderfully made," the chronicler writes.

One visitor was so impressed that he burst forth in verse, using ingenious outvotes to bolster up the muse:

Why dost thou start! Why pale and out of breath?

"Tis but thyself thou see'st disrobed by death.

Approach these honest bones, nor stare aghast,

In this complexion must thou come at last.

The human frame stripped of its flushing skin,

Each larger duct and ruddy muscle seen...

There Waterhouse shines! His Esculpapian art.

Ranges in order every doubtful part;

Free of access, with easy manners crowned.

He speaks and information spreads around!

"*At the sight of the skeleton

"*An anatomical preparation."

In 1810 after holding forth in Holden for 27 years, the School was moved to Boston but the specimens which has given Holden a sort of morbid lure, remained abandoned in their place, closed up in the now otherwise deserted chapel.

But the desertion was not really total. For a few weeks each spring, the doors were unlocked for the repetition of the well known course of "sepulchral lectures in anatomy" perseveringly delivered year in and year out by the Warrens. In order to capitalize to the greatest degree possible the rare and difficult to obtain subjects, usually one corpse a year the lectures were often from two to three hours long.

During off-season at Holden that is, all year except during the spring lectures, midnight raids on the "medical museum" were one of the most popular diversions of enterprising undergraduates who frequently used the spoils to decorate their rooms.