ABSTRACT
Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University on the use of the microscope. Some of the earliest teaching of medical microscopy was done by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (physician and poet and father of the Supreme Court justice) at the Tremont Street Medical School in Boston in 1851 and at the Harvard Medical School (where he was Professor of Anatomy and Physiology) beginning in 1855.9 Holmes was an early advocate for the application of the information gained from microscopy to medical education and, in his introductory lecture to the entering class at Harvard Medical School in 1862 he stated that: “we are now in possession of an instrument freed from all confusions and illusions, which magnifies a thousand diameters.” He went on to say that the “minute structure of all the organs has been made out in the most satisfactory way.”10 However, Holmes, reflecting his medical training in France, was no advocate of laboratory instruction. Warner9
states that “by 1860, the leading American medical schools were teaching microscopy,” at least in the lecture hall.
