The Faculty of the School then included Dr. O. W. Holmes and Professor Jeffries Wyman. Charles Ed. Brown-Séquard was lecturing on the pathology of the nervous system. During the years of James's interrupted course a number of men attended the school who were to be his friends and colleagues for many years thereafter--among them William G. Farlow, subsequently Professor of Cryptogamic Botany and a Cambridge neighbor for forty years, and Charles P. Putnam and James J. Putnam--two brothers in whose company he was later to spend many Adirondack vacations and to whom he became warmly attached. Henry P. Bowditch, whose instinct for physiological inquiry was already vigorous, and who was destined to become a leader of research in America, and the teacher and inspirer of a generation of younger investigators, was another Medical School contemporary with whom he formed an enduring friendship. The instruction given in the Harvard Medical School in the sixties was as good as any obtainable in America, but it fell short of what is nowadays reckoned as essential for a medical education to an extent that none but a modern student of medicine can understand. The emphasis was still on lectures, demonstrations and reading, and the pupil's rôle was an almost completely passive one. James, according to the testimony of one of his classmates, made a solitary exception to the practice of the class by attempting to keep a graphic record of his microscopic studies in histology and pathology. When questioned about this long after, he admitted that he believed himself to have been the only student of his time in the Medical School who took the trouble to make drawings from the microscopic field with regularity. The teaching of Pasteur and Lister had not then revolutionized medicine. Modern bacteriology and the possibilities of aseptic surgery were yet to be understood. Surgeons who operated in the amphitheatre of the Massachusetts General Hospital could still take pride in appearing in blood-soiled gowns, much as a fisherman scorns a brand-new outfit and sports his weather-rusted old clothes. The demonstrations of even Dr. Henry J. Bigelow, a skillful operator who was then a leader in his profession, filled James with a horror which he never forgot.