Dear Members of the HMS and HSDM Community:
One of my early acts as dean was to form the HMS Faculty Council Subcommittee on Artwork and Cultural Representations. This broadly constituted group—made up of HMS faculty members, medical and graduate students, and both salaried and hourly staff drawn from departments and offices across the School—has been offering advice and direction on several projects throughout HMS over the past few years.
In July, after receiving a petition spearheaded by our medical students urging the HMS administration to change the name of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Society, I asked the committee’s leaders, Nawal Nour and Fidencio Saldaña, and my strategic advisor, Willy Lensch, to convene their members along with additional individuals from the HMS and HSDM communities to form a special task force to address these specific objectives:
- Develop a set of guiding principles that broadly deliberated why we name features across our campus and under what circumstances we might consider changing an eponymous feature.
- Apply these guiding principles to consider a specific case: Should the name of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Society at HMS be changed, what general principles should guide such a decision, and if it should change, what might the new name be?
The task force did its work and returned a deeply considered set of guiding principles, Inspiration and Aspiration: Elements to Consider Regarding Eponymous Features at HMS. On the specific question of the Holmes Society, the group wrote: “The Task Force agreed that Dr. Holmes’ contributions to science, medicine and elements of the culture of his time were incredible. However, his publicly articulated views concerning racial inequality, even understood in the context of their time and perhaps further informing our understanding of his role in the expulsion of HMS’s first three African American students, run especially contrary to the guiding principles articulated in the Inspiration and Aspiration document as well as other sources cited therein. This discordance was particularly evident regarding the specific use of Dr. Holmes’ name for a student society at HMS.”
After considering several possible alternatives for a new namesake, the task force unanimously recommended the late William Augustus Hinton, AB 1905, MD 1912. I was delighted to hear this, as it was a little over a year ago that HMS celebrated the installation of a formal portrait of Dr. Hinton in the Waterhouse Room in Gordon Hall. Dr. Hinton was a Harvard College and HMS graduate, an HMS faculty member, a beloved teacher of medical students, an ardent advocate for the advancement of underrepresented people in science and medicine and the first Black full professor at Harvard. After being denied the opportunity to train as a surgeon because of his race, he became an internationally recognized infectious disease researcher who contributed enormously to public health and medical practice worldwide.
I am writing today to announce that I have formally accepted the task force’s guiding principles document and recommendations to rename the Holmes Society in honor of Dr. Hinton, effective immediately. Please join me in celebrating the William Augustus Hinton Society. Click here to read more, including perspectives from members of the task force.
As I said in my community email following the killing of George Floyd, HMS’ mission statement, community values and diversity statement signify our deep commitment to respect, integrity and accountability. Among these core principles is that we acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of our history and actively promote social justice, challenge discrimination and address disparities and inequities. With that, I want to thank and congratulate the task force, whose work is an important step on our path toward social justice.
Sincerely,
George Q. Daley
Dean of the Faculty of Medicine
Harvard University