Word: medlies
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Med. Fac. Society—a playful abbreviation of “medical faculty”—was born. The name was chosen to reflect the medical benefits of a society whose embrace of the absurd diverted the mind from pain and sadness...
Legend had it that in order to become a member of the Med. Fac., interested undergraduates had to pull a prank serious enough to risk expulsion from the College. In the early days of the society, the club’s pranks included mocking college administrators and granting fake degrees, painting the John Harvard statue red, and locking unpopular tutors in their studies. The society issued honorary degrees—fake diplomas written in pidgin Latin—to notable contemporaries, such as the prince of Haiti, a pair of Siamese twins known as Cheng and Heng, a sea serpent...
Trouble first struck the group in 1824, in fact, when Alexander I took his honorary Med. Fac. degree a bit too seriously, donating a set of sterling silver surgical instruments to the actual Medical Faculty of Harvard as a sign of gratitude...
...Josiah Quincy targeted the group as an example of rebellious student behavior. In Quincy’s son’s book “Figures of the Past,” the younger Quincy writes, “Among college clubs the place must be reserved for the Med. Fac., a roaring burlesque upon learned bodies in general and the college government in particular...
Perhaps due to Quincy’s hostility, in 1834 the Med. Fac. Society entrusted some of its artwork and artifacts to the Hasty Pudding Institute. But the history of the Med. Fac. was far from over...