The university had been founded just twenty-five years when provision was made for the establishment of the medical department. According to most of the chronicles the first chair in medicine was founded June 21, 1578, although there are some authorities who state that this establishment came only in 1580. I am a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School myself, and I yield to none of her sons in veneration for my Alma Mater, but I cannot pass over this statement of the foundation of the medical school in Mexico without recalling that we have been rather proud at the University of Pennsylvania to be known as the First American Medical School. This is, of course, only due to our fond United States way of assuming {322} ourselves to be all America and utterly neglecting any knowledge of Spanish America. I believe that there are tablets erected at the University of Pennsylvania chronicling our priority. One of them is to the first graduating class, the other to the first faculty of the medical school. I believe that between the erection of the two tablets there had come to be some suspicion of the possibility that South America was ahead of us in this respect and so the second tablet specifically mentions North America. When I talked some time ago before the College of Physicians of Philadelphia on this subject one of my friends, who was a teacher at the university, asked me what they should do with their tablets. I suggested that, by all means, they should be allowed to remain, and that as soon as possible an opportunity should be secured to erect the third tablet containing a statement of the real facts with regard to the place of the University of Pennsylvania as the protagonist in medicine in the United States. The tablets will then serve to show the gradual evolution of our knowledge of the true history of medical education in this country. It is all the more important that this should be the arrangement because the University of Pennsylvania has been a leader in "the discovery" of South America that has been made by us in the last few years.