Ivy League Insulation

Nestled among a forest of red brick in the northwest corner of Harvard Yard is a triangular flash of blue. This bright anomaly is perched above the lone door of a little square building that shelters in the midst of all the more uniform, rectangular dormitories around it. That little square building is Holden Chapel, and for almost two hundred years it sheltered a dark piece of history within its walls.

Holden first opened its door in 1744, welcoming the students of Harvard College to worship for the first time on their own campus and in their own chapel. It must have felt like a turning point for Harvard College, just having passed its one hundredth birthday and finally big enough to earn a little independence from the town it had sustained and which was now also growing up into a little more self-sufficiency. But, as is often the case when progress gains a toehold, Holden was replaced with a newer and shinier space after barely twenty years of service. An unlucky winter fire torched the college’s original library building (burning, according to legend, all but one of John Harvard’s books—the one being returned by a student who had illegally removed it from the library and was summarily expelled for his heroism), making way for a shiny new hall to house a shiny new library and dining hall … and chapel. Poor Holden sat forgotten, serving briefly as an army office for George Washington’s Continental forces, but mostly moldering gently for another twenty years.

Holden’s years of patiently filling space in the Yard were finally rewarded again in 1782, when history once more walked through the little chapel’s door. The Revolutionary War was drawing to a close, and minds were starting to turn away from the demands of war and toward the necessities of building a brand new country. Harvard, as the new nation’s oldest college, naturally turned its attention towards catching up with the great universities of Europe. And what better way to move education into the nineteenth century than to experiment with medicine! A group of fine, Harvard-educated physicians gathered. They discussed. They fought amongst themselves and kicked out one of their original members for (sacrilegiously) experimenting with smallpox inoculations. They opened what would become the world-famous Harvard Medical School. And immediately ran into a few problems.

First of all, up to that point, Harvard taught one curriculum—a basic classics education. Boys came, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, to study Greek, Latin, arithmetic, and the Bible. They read books. They memorized and recited things. They went to chapel. They graduated and apprenticed themselves to lawyers, ministers, teachers, or doctors, and learned their trades the old-fashioned way. In short, Harvard was not equipped to teach practical science. They needed new tools. They needed new methods. They needed new space. Different space. Not another small classroom for sitting and reading, reciting and discussing. No. Something bigger—fit for bubbling and cutting and experimenting. And big enough again so that the students could, in fact, watch their professors bubble and cut and experiment. They needed an amphitheater. They had a chapel. Perfect! Holden finally had a bold new purpose. The cobwebs were swept out, a second-floor viewing balcony was added, and voila! Harvard had a surgical theater for its brand new medical school.

Holden Chapel thus became the first, official building of what would become a world-famous institution. It was a perfect arrangement that lasted fourteen years. In 1816, yet again, poor Holden Chapel was surpassed by the newer and shinier, and far more spacious, lure of real estate across the river. Harvard Medical School moved to Boston. It put down roots on the banks of the muddy Charles next door to its protégée, a new and exciting social experiment—a public hospital! This complex would one-day become Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School would move again, but, in the meantime, Harvard’s future doctors would learn with a river-front view, and Holden Chapel would carry on. Providing classroom spaces for the undergraduates. And office spaces for the administration. The paint again peeled, temporary walls were put up and taken down. Various Harvard choirs began using the space for rehearsals. And in 1999 it was finally decided that an official remodel was in order.

Plans for the long-awaited renovation were discussed and solidified. The artisans and machines got to work. And one fateful day, a wall opened up and released into the light an avalanche of bones. Bones holding traces of arsenic and lead. Bones sprinkled with frayed bits of fabric and old buttons. Literal skeletons in the walls. Renovations halted. A team of researchers came in to investigate. An uncomfortable fact of early medical education at Harvard cowered under a new beam of focus. Upon brief reflection, it seemed obvious these bodies had to be related to the early medical school, but why were they still here? The short answer turned out to be: the Puritans.

Even though the Puritan church as we think of it basically gasped away its last theocratic hold on New England with the witchcraft panic in Salem in 1692, those black-hatted folks did found the place. And their influence lingers in the laws of New England even into our modern lives (happy hour is still forbidden in Massachusetts—well, you can discount food, but ABSOLUTELY no half-priced drinks!). In 1782, and well into the 1800s, it was (perhaps sensibly) illegal to buy and sell human bodies in Massachusetts. What was more problematic for the fledgling medical school at Harvard, however, was that it was also illegal to desecrate a human body if you happened to have one. (A dead one—people were slightly less concerned about what you did with ones that were still alive.) A sensible law on the surface, but this ruled out both autopsies and dissections. Harvard’s poor medical students were legally denied the joy of digging into a corpse for their own edification and the future of science. A real shame. A sad difficulty. But those pesky European universities really could not stay in the lead forever. Enter the Resurrectionists.

In the wake of a war that had lasted at least six years, and after nearly two centuries of folks living and dying in the increasingly crowded communities along the three square miles of the Charles river closest to Boston harbor, the old Puritan burial grounds were starting to get a teensy bit over-crowded. Lovely, pastoral, landscaped cemeteries were still forty years in Massachusetts’ future at the time Holden Chapel opened its door to its first medical students, so really, the crop was nearby and ripe for the picking. A mutually beneficial relationship began to form between the new school and those willing to do a little late-night digging. At the height of this trade, the medical school could be counted on to pay up to twenty dollars for a good fresh body. At a time when the average unskilled workman earned roughly sixteen dollars a week … well, that was princely sum for a couple hours’ unsupervised work. Steady demand, steady supply, steady work—all in the name of advancing medical science! The only problem left on the slab was what to do with those corpses once they’d had their day in class. They couldn’t be returned, either to families or to their original graves. The system worked best, after all, if the budding scientists had no idea who these bodies were or where they came from. So, some did end up staying on, preserved and dressed, as tenured teaching models. But most were sent down, or rather behind … or in. Carved into neat little pieces, arsenic liberally applied to stave off the inevitable stench of decay, a good number of the used-up specimens found their way into the walls of the old chapel. And there they stayed, listening to the chatter and song of nearly two centuries’ worth of cheerful Harvard undergraduates until, at the turn of the twenty-first century, a little overdue restoration work reintroduced them to the light of day.

What remains of those early medical teaching assistants now resides somewhere in the anthropological collections of Harvard’s Peabody museum, and Holden Chapel, restored at last, carries on as the designated and official rehearsal space for the Harvard Glee Club and other Harvard choral groups. All is calm and out in the open once more. Though it does make you wonder what might be waiting inside other walls and beneath other floors. Buildings that have seen enough years always have more than one story to tell.