President Joseph Willard replied that far from even considering Gibbon, the College used a text by French historian Abbé Millot. president, graduates.ġ791: A writer in the Boston press accused Harvard of poisoning students’ minds with Edward Gibbon’s monumental “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” (1776-88). Benjamin Waterhouse was named to a second Medical School professorship, in the “Theory and Practice of Physic.”ġ783: With high ceremony, Harvard Medical School officially opened as the “Medical Institution of Harvard University.” Its first home was the ever-versatile Holden Chapel.ġ787: John Quincy Adams, future U.S.
During the previous year while head of the army hospital in Boston, he had given Harvard students their first formal medical instruction. The first medical instruction given to Harvard students in 1781 and the founding of the Medical School in 1782 made it a university in fact as well as name.ġ781: Oldest continuous chapter of Phi Beta Kappa formed at Harvard.ġ782: Twenty-nine-year-old John Warren was appointed Professor of Anatomy and Surgery at the Medical School. 1764: Original Harvard Hall burns, destroying some 5,000 volumes and all but one of John Harvard’s books.ġ775: Continental soldiers are quartered in Harvard buildings.ġ776: Eight Harvard alumni sign the Declaration of Independence.ġ780: The Massachusetts Constitution went into effect and officially recognized Harvard as a university.
