Harvard Medical School#Quadrangle

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Harvard Medical School was founded on September 19, 1782, on the initiative of Harvard President Joseph Willard. The founding faculty were John Warren, Aaron Dexter, and Benjamin Waterhouse. It is the third-oldest medical school in the United States, after the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Lectures were first held in the basement of Harvard Hall, then in Holden Chapel. Students paid no tuition but purchased tickets to five or six daily lectures.{{Cite book |title=The Development of Harvard University since the inauguration of President Eliot, 1869–1929 |last=Morison |first=Samuel Eliot |publisher=Harvard University Press |year=1930 |location=Cambridge, Massachusetts |pages=555–594 & Preface}} The first two students graduated in 1788.{{cite web |url=https://hms.harvard.edu/about-hms/history-hms |title=The History of HMS |website=hms.harvard.edu |access-date=August 3, 2017 |archive-date=August 2, 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170802183220/https://hms.harvard.edu/about-hms/history-hms |url-status=live}}

In the following century, the school moved locations several times due to changing clinical relationships, a function of the fact that Harvard Medical School does not directly own or operate a teaching hospital.{{cite web |url=https://medstudenthandbook.hms.harvard.edu/history-harvard-medicine |title=History of Harvard Medicine |website=medstudenthandbook.hms.harvard.edu |access-date=August 4, 2017 |archive-date=August 4, 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170804220152/https://medstudenthandbook.hms.harvard.edu/history-harvard-medicine |url-status=live}} In 1810, the school moved to Boston at what is now downtown Washington Street. In 1816, the school was moved to Mason Street and was called the Massachusetts Medical College of Harvard University in recognition of a gift from the Great and General Court of Massachusetts. In 1847, the school was moved to Grove Street to be closer to Massachusetts General Hospital. In 1883, the school was relocated to Copley Square. Before this move, Charles William Eliot became Harvard's president in 1869,{{Cite EB1911 |wstitle= Eliot, Charles William |volume = 9 |last= |first= |author-link= |pages= 274-275 |short=1}} and found the medical school in the worst condition of any part of the university. He instituted drastic reforms that raised admissions standards, instituted a formal degree program, and defined HMS as a professional school within Harvard University that laid the groundwork for its transformation into one of the leading medical schools in the world.

In 1906, the school moved to its present location in the Longwood Medical and Academic Area.{{cite web |url=http://www.countway.harvard.edu/archives/historyNotes.shtml |title=Countway Medical Library — Records Management — Historical Notes |access-date=February 25, 2007 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060901175511/http://www.countway.harvard.edu/archives/historyNotes.shtml |archive-date=September 1, 2006}}

Harvard Medical School postdoctoral trainees and faculty have been associated with several important medical and public health innovations:

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• Introduction of smallpox vaccination to America
• Introduction of insulin to the US to treat diabetes
• Comprehending of the role of vitamin B12 in treating anemia
• Identification of coenzyme A and understanding of proteins
• Developing tissue culture methods for the polio virus, which paved the way for vaccines against polio
• Mapping the visual system of the brain
• Development of the first successful chemotherapy for childhood leukemia
• Development of the first implantable cardiac pacemaker
• Discovering the inheritance of immunity to infection
• Development of artificial skin for burn victims
• First successful heart valve surgery (at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, 1923){{cite journal |last1=Cohn |first1=Lawrence H |last2=Tchantchaleishvilli |first2=Vakhtang |last3=Rajab |first3=Taufiek K |title=Evolution of the concept and practice of mitral valve repair |journal=Annals of Cardiothoracic Surgery |date=July 2015 |volume=4 |issue=4 |pages=315–321 |doi=10.3978/j.issn.2225-319X.2015.04.09 |pmid=26309840 |pmc=4526492 }}
• First successful human kidney transplant
• First reattachment of a severed human limb
• Discovery of the genes that cause Duchenne muscular dystrophy, Huntington's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease), and Alzheimer's disease, among many others
• Establishing the importance of tumor vascular supply (angiogenesis) and seeding vascular biology

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File:Front Entrance of Massachusetts General Hospital.jpg, the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School{{Cite web|url=https://www.massgeneral.org/education/about|title=About Education}}

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In mid-1847, professor Walter Channing's proposal that women be admitted to lectures and examinations was rejected by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. That year Harriot Hunt became the first woman to apply to Harvard Medical School. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. had recently been made Dean of the school and initially considered accepting her application. He was heavily criticized by the all-male student bodyMenand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001: 8. {{ISBN|0-374-19963-9}}. as well as the university overseers and other faculty members, and she was asked to withdraw her application.Gibian, Peter. Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001: 176. {{ISBN|0-511-01763-4}}. Shortly after Elizabeth Blackwell's graduation from Geneva College in 1849, Hunt applied to Harvard again, but was denied.{{Cite AMB1920|wstitle=Hunt, Harriot Kezia}}

In 1866, two women with extensive medical education elsewhere applied but were denied admission. In 1867, a single faculty member's vote blocked the admission of Susan Dimock.{{Cite web |title=Susan Dimock, MD, pioneering American physician |url=https://www.facs.org/for-medical-professionals/news-publications/news-and-articles/bulletin/2021/03/susan-dimock-md-pioneering-american-physician/#:~:text=In%201867,%20Dr.,gender%20(see%20Figure%201).&text=They%20were%20neither%20the%20first,78%20years%20later,%20in%201945. |access-date=2024-09-17 |website=ACS |language=en}}

In 1872, Harvard declined a gift of $10,000 conditioned on the medical school admitting women medical students on the same terms as men.

A similar offer of $50,000, by a group of ten women including Marie Elizabeth Zakrzewska, was declined in 1882; a committee of five was appointed to study the matter.

After the medical school moved from North Grove Street to Boylston Street in 1883, professor Henry Ingersoll Bowditch's proposal that the North Grove Street premises be used for medical education for women was rejected.

In 1943, a dean's committee recommended the admission of women, the proportion of men and women being dependent solely on the qualifications of the applicants.{{Cite book |title=Medicine at Harvard : the first three hundred years |last=Beecher |first=Henry Knowles |publisher=University Press of New England |year=1977 |location=Hanover, N.H. |pages=460–481}}

In 1945, the first class of women was admitted; projected benefits included helping male students learn to view women as equals, increasing the number of physicians in lower-paid specialties typically shunned by men, and replacing the weakest third of all-male classes with better-qualified women.{{cite report |url=http://repository.countway.harvard.edu/xmlui/handle/10473/1782 |title=First class of women admitted to Harvard Medical School, 1945 |publisher=Countway Repository, Harvard University Library |access-date=May 2, 2016 |date= |archive-date=June 23, 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160623235357/http://repository.countway.harvard.edu/xmlui/handle/10473/1782 |url-status=dead}} By 1972, about one-fifth of Harvard medical students were women.

In 1850, three black men, Martin Delany, Daniel Laing Jr., and Isaac H. Snowden, were admitted to the school but were later expelled under pressure from faculty and other students.

In 1968, in response to a petition signed by hundreds of medical students, the faculty established a commission on relations with the black community in Boston; at the time less than one percent of Harvard medical students were black. By 1973, the number of black students admitted had tripled, and by the next year, it had quadrupled. In 2011, HMS appointed its first African American full professor of medicine, Valerie E. Stone.{{Cite web |title=A friendship endures from Yale to Harvard |url=https://medicine.yale.edu/ysm/news/yale-medicine-magazine/a-friendship-endures-from-yale-to-harvard/ |last=Soucheray |first=Stephanie |website=Yale School of Medicine |language=en |access-date=2020-06-01 |archive-date=January 29, 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220129220354/https://medicine.yale.edu/news/yale-medicine-magazine/article/a-friendship-endures-from-yale-to-harvard/ |url-status=live}} That year they also appointed their first African-American professor of radiology, Stone's former classmate Tina Young Poussaint.

In 2019, LaShyra Nolen was the first black woman to be elected class president of Harvard Medical School.{{Cite web |last=Nolen |first=LaShyra "Lash" |title=Being a 'First' Is My Great Honor. But It's Not Enough. |url=https://www.teenvogue.com/story/lash-nolen-harvard-being-first-oped |access-date=2020-06-11 |website=Teen Vogue |date=May 11, 2020 |language=en-us |archive-date=June 11, 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200611185323/https://www.teenvogue.com/story/lash-nolen-harvard-being-first-oped |url-status=live}}

On June 14, 2023, the morgue manager for the Anatomical Gifts Program at Harvard Medical School, Cedric Lodge, and associates were criminally charged with theft of human organs by the U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania.[https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdpa/pr/six-charged-trafficking-stolen-human-remains "Six Charged With Trafficking In Stolen Human Remains"] United States Attorney's Office, June 14, 2023. Retrieved January 20, 2024. Twelve lawsuits were subsequently filed against the school by families of Lodge's victims.[https://www.reuters.com/legal/harvard-urges-judge-toss-families-lawsuits-over-morgue-scandal-2024-01-19/ "Harvard urges judge to toss families' lawsuits over morgue scandal"] Nate Raymond, Reuters, January 19, 2024. Retrieved January 20, 2024. On January 17, 2024, a lawyer representing Harvard urged Suffolk County Superior Court Judge Kenneth Salinger to dismiss the lawsuits.

File:Bulletin of the Warren Anatomical Museum (1910) (14760804254).jpg at HMS (named for its founder John Collins Warren, first Dean of HMS).]]

Harvard Medical School has gone through many curricular revisions for its MD program. In recent decades, HMS has maintained a three-phase curriculum with a classroom-based pre-clerkship phase, a principal clinical experience (PCE), and a post-PCE phase.{{cite web |url=https://meded.hms.harvard.edu/md-program |title=MD Program |website=meded.hms.harvard.edu |access-date=March 5, 2019 |archive-date=March 6, 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190306043330/https://meded.hms.harvard.edu/md-program |url-status=live}}

The pre-clerkship phase has two curricular tracks. The majority of students enter the more traditional Pathways track that focuses on active learning and earlier entry into the clinic with courses that include students from the Harvard School of Dental Medicine. Pathways students gain early exposure to the clinic through a longitudinal clinical skills course that lasts the duration of the pre-clerkship phase. A small portion of each class enters the HST track, which is jointly administered with MIT. The HST track is designed to train physician-scientists with an emphasis on basic physiology and quantitative understanding of biological processes through courses that include Ph.D. students from MIT.

Admission to Harvard Medical School's MD program is highly selective. There are 165 total spots for each incoming class, with 135 spots in the Pathways curriculum and 30 spots in the HST program.{{cite web |url=https://meded.hms.harvard.edu/admissions-at-a-glance |title=Admissions at a Glance |website=meded.hms.harvard.edu |access-date=November 1, 2018 |archive-date=January 27, 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190127111756/https://meded.hms.harvard.edu/admissions-at-a-glance |url-status=live}} While both use a single application, each curricular track independently evaluates applicants.

For the MD Class of 2023, 6,815 candidates applied, and 227 were admitted (3.3%). There was a matriculation rate of 73%.

For 2024, U.S. News & World Report did not rank Harvard Medical School due to its official withdrawal from the USNWR. For 2023, Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research reported that Harvard Medical School is No. 43 in Research.{{Cite web |first1=Robert |last1=Roskoski Jr. |first2=Tristram G. |last2=Parslow |title=BRIMR Rankings of NIH Funding in 2023 |url=https://brimr.org/brimr-rankings-of-nih-funding-in-2023/ |work=Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research }}

There are nine PhD programs based in Harvard Medical School.{{cite web |url=https://hms.harvard.edu/education-admissions/phd-degree-programs |title=PhD Degree Programs |website=hms.harvard.edu |access-date=July 9, 2020 |archive-date=July 9, 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200709170832/https://hms.harvard.edu/education-admissions/phd-degree-programs |url-status=live}} Students in these programs are enrolled in the Division of Medical Sciences in Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) and are part of the HILS (Harvard Integrated Life Sciences) inter-program federation.{{cite web |url=https://gsas.harvard.edu/programs-of-study/divisions/harvard-integrated-life-sciences |title=Harvard Integrated Life Sciences |website=gsas.harvard.edu |access-date=July 9, 2020 |archive-date=July 7, 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200707151707/https://gsas.harvard.edu/programs-of-study/divisions/harvard-integrated-life-sciences |url-status=live}}

Harvard Medical School offers two types of master's degrees, Master of Medical Sciences (MMSc) degrees and Master of Science (MS) degrees.{{cite web |url=https://hms.harvard.edu/education-admissions/masters-degree-programs |title=Master's Degree Programs |website=hms.harvard.edu |access-date=July 9, 2020 |archive-date=July 7, 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200707191443/https://hms.harvard.edu/education-admissions/masters-degree-programs |url-status=live}}

Harvard Medical School offers several Postgraduate Certificate programs.{{Cite web |title=Certificate Programs |url=https://postgraduateeducation.hms.harvard.edu/certificate-programs |access-date=2021-01-27 |website=postgraduateeducation.hms.harvard.edu |language=en |archive-date=February 3, 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210203190324/https://postgraduateeducation.hms.harvard.edu/certificate-programs |url-status=live}} These graduate-level programs may run up to twelve months. Admitted participants are awarded a Certificate from Harvard Medical School upon successful completion, and are eligible for associate membership in the Harvard Alumni Association.{{Cite web |title=FAQs |url=https://postgraduateeducation.hms.harvard.edu/certificate-programs/faqs |access-date=2021-01-27 |website=postgraduateeducation.hms.harvard.edu |language=en |archive-date=February 6, 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210206135257/https://postgraduateeducation.hms.harvard.edu/certificate-programs/faqs |url-status=live}}

Harvard Medical School does not directly own or operate any hospitals and instead relies on affiliated teaching hospitals for clinical education. Medical students primarily complete their clinical experiences at the following hospitals.{{cite web |url=https://meded.hms.harvard.edu/pathways |title=Pathways |website=meded.hms.harvard.edu |access-date=November 1, 2018 |archive-date=May 9, 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180509022113/https://meded.hms.harvard.edu/pathways |url-status=live}} Clinical faculty at Harvard Medical School generally hold a concurrent appointment as a physician or a surgeon at one of the affiliated hospitals. Basic science faculty at Harvard Medical School may hold the primary appointment at the School itself or one of the affiliated hospitals.

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• Dana–Farber Cancer Institute
• David Reich Lab
• Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
• Boston Children's Hospital
• Brigham and Women's Hospital
• Cambridge Health Alliance
• Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute
• Hebrew SeniorLife
• Joslin Diabetes Center
• The Baker Center for Children and Families
• Massachusetts Eye and Ear
• Massachusetts General Hospital
• McLean Hospital
• Mount Auburn Hospital
• Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital
• VA Boston Healthcare System

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{{Main|List of Harvard Medical School alumni}}

As of 2020, there are over 10,425 alumni. It has trained more Nobel Prize winners in Medicine and Physiology than any other medical school.{{cite web |title=The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine |url=https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/ |website=nobelprize.org |publisher=The Nobel Foundation |access-date=16 August 2024}}{{cite journal |title=Nobel laureates and their medical schools: who selected whom? {{!}} Table 2 |date=2015 |publisher=National Library of Medicine |pmc=4462236 |last1=Weisse |first1=A. B. |journal=Proceedings (Baylor University. Medical Center) |volume=28 |issue=3 |pages=404–405 |doi=10.1080/08998280.2015.11929293 |pmid=26130903 }}

• Boston Medical Library
• Harvard School of Dental Medicine
• List of Harvard University people
• Warren Anatomical Museum

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