"But as Doctor Holmes well said, there are more attractive and instructive matters to engage our most grateful interest in the occasion to which he gave such a grand interpretation. The century of medical history which he sketched with such a naïve and vigorous narrative has its most suggestive incidents lettered on the walls on the main stairway of the imposing edifice just opened for use. Little Holden Hall in Cambridge; the obscure structure on Mason street; the melancholy building on Grove street, with its tragic history, in which the donor of its site was turned to a use by no means serviceable to science, make up the genealogical, architectural ancestry of the new hall. The development in the material fabric is no inadequate symbol of the progress in every quality, accomplishment and attainment characteristic of the advance of the profession in the last hundred years." The name of Doctor Holmes will always be so intimately connected with the Harvard Medical School that we give below a brief sketch of its past history. In the year 1780, the Boston Medical Society voted "that Doctor John Warren be desired to demonstrate a course of anatomical lectures the ensuing winter." The course of lectures proved so popular that the corporation of the college asked Doctor Warren to draw up a plan for a Medical School in connection with Harvard College. At the commencement of the school, October 7th, 1783, there were three professors: Doctor John Warren, who lectured on anatomy and surgery; Doctor Aaron Dexter, who took the department of chemistry and materia medica; and Doctor Benjamin Waterhouse, instructor in the theory and practice of medicine. During the first year of its establishment the attendance was rather small, consisting of members of the senior class of the college and those students who could procure the consent of their parents. The name of the first graduate recorded was that of John Fleet, in 1788, and he seems to have been the only graduate of that class. In 1806, Doctor John Collins Warren, son of Doctor John Warren, was appointed assistant professor of anatomy and surgery. He proved a most enthusiastic laborer in behalf of the school and to it he gave his large anatomical collection, which was considered the most complete in the country. In his will he bequeathed his body to the interest of science, and provided that his skeleton be prepared and mounted, to serve the uses of the demonstrators on anatomy. It was he, also, who took the first steps that led to the establishment of the Medical School in Boston. At 49 Marlborough street, he opened a room for the demonstration of practical anatomy, and here a course of lectures was started in the autumn of 1810 by Doctors Warren, Jackson, and Waterhouse.