PATRIOTS DAY RECALLS MEDICAL SCHOOL START

In connection with Patriots Day tomorrow, it is one of the lesser-known facts of Harvard history that the Battle of Lexington and Concord, fought 158 years ago, was largely responsible for the establishment of the Medical School.

The colonists who were wounded during the battle were cared for by their comrades and were carried to their own homes. No one paid any attention to the British wounded, however, and the survivors of the march on Concord were in too much of a hurry to bother with them. It remained for Dr. Isaac Foster, Jr. of Charleston, a Harvard graduate of the class of 1758 and a member of the Provincial congress, to set up a hospital at what is now 95 Brattle Street. The wounded British prisoners were taken there, and within two months Dr. Foster and his staff of assistants recruited from among the undergraduates of the College, were maintaining the main sick bay of the army. From this emergency station developed the present Harvard Medical School.

Immediately following the battle the students were sent away and the occupation of the College buildings by the Continental troops began. The library was moved to Andover for safe keeping, the College itself resumed classes in Concord but returned to Cambridge in time to celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The five buildings which comprised Harvard College in 1775 were placed at the disposal of the army. Approximately 640 men were squeezed into Massachusetts Hall, a building normally meant to house 64 supernatural phenomena. Bells rang in "Scholars." About the same number was placed in "The New College" of Hollis Hall, 240 soldiers were assigned to the "Old College," "the first Stoughton," while Holden housed 160 of the troops."

Harvard Hall was used largely for storage and for the commissary department. The new lead roof which dated from the great fire of 1764 was removed, and about 1000 pounds of it was melted up into bullets