Warren Anatomical Museum artifact collection

John Collins Warren (1778-1856) first began to teach with his personal anatomical and pathological collection at Harvard Medical School’s new Mason Street location in 1816. This collection was entitled the Museum of the Massachusetts Medical College. In 1847 John Collins Warren retired from Harvard Medical School and donated his personal teaching museum to the University, along with an endowment of $5,000 in railroad stock to support the collection. Harvard renamed the museum the Warren Anatomical Museum in honor of John Collins Warren and his gift. A professor of anatomy and surgery at Harvard Medical School, Warren was also a surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, a founder of the New England Journal of Medicine, and son of John Warren, Harvard Medical School’s principal founder and first professor. Warren recognized the importance of anatomical specimens for instructing students in medical schools and wished to ensure that his collection would continue to be used for that purpose.

When first opened, the Warren Anatomical Museum was housed on North Grove Street in Boston. John Barnard Swett (J. B. S.) Jackson (1806-1879) served as the museum’s first curator, from 1847 to 1879. A professor of anatomy at Harvard Medical School, he published A Descriptive Catalogue of the Warren Anatomical Museum in 1870. In 1879, William Fiske Whitney (1850-1921) became curator, and in 1883, the museum moved with the Medical School to Boylston Street, Boston. During this time, Whitney worked closely with Thomas Dwight (1843-1911, who followed Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. as Parkman Professor of Anatomy at Harvard Medical School), a grandson of John Collins Warren. Dwight worked to develop the museum’s osteological collection. In 1906, the museum moved again with the Medical School, this time to the new Longwood campus, where it was located on the top floors of the main administration building, now known as Gordon Hall. The move to Longwood resulted in an increase in the museum’s collections, facilities, and outreach efforts. During this time, it continued to serve a significant role as a resource for the teaching of medicine.

After Whitney’s death in 1921, control of the museum was transferred to the Committee of the Warren Museum and then the Pathology Department, until Myrtelle M. Canavan (1879-1953) was named curator in 1924. Canavan focused her collecting efforts on neuropathological specimens and also helped to standardize the museum’s accessioning practices. Upon Canavan’s retirement in 1945, the Committee of the Warren Museum once again oversaw its operations until Paul Yakovlev was appointed curator in 1956. By then, however, the museum’s space in Gordon Hall had been reduced to make room for administrative offices, and changes in teaching practices marked a decline in the use of the museum for educational purposes. In 1961, the Committee and Harvard Medical School Dean George Packer Berry reassessed the function of the museum, resulting in a further reduction of space and the movement of non-historical exhibits out of Gordon Hall and into related departments or storage, and the appointment of Hersey Professor of Anatomy and cell biologist Don Wayne Fawcett (1917-2009) as curator. This transitional period marked the end of the museum’s teaching function and the beginning of its historical function. Fawcett resigned in 1969, in part due to philosophical differences with the medical school’s administrative staff over the museum’s role at the school. Charles Peirson Lyman (1912-2010) became curator in 1970.

The 1970s and 1980s were a period of further contraction of the Warren Museum’s status and space. David L. Gunner served as curatorial associate and as the primary administrator for the collection from 1970 to 1989 while the museum was under the administrative control of the Anatomy Department. During Gunner’s tenure, in 1987, the remaining collection not on exhibit was removed to long-term storage. In the 1990s, the museum was administered by a part-time curator and part-time curatorial assistant and, in 1997, the last exhibits were moved out of Gordon Hall and into storage. The museum was reorganized in 2000, becoming part of the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine’s Center for the History of Medicine. Library staff realized the potential of the museum for both historical and modern medical research and worked with museum colleagues at Harvard and elsewhere in order to revitalize and re-focus the museum’s mission. Large-scale surveys of the collection were completed, as well as a move to a modern museum storage facility.

The museum currently resides in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and is a part of the library’s Center for the History of Medicine. The museum’s collection comprises around 15,000 objects, with most of the objects in storage and the remainder in permanent exhibit space on the Library’s fifth floor.