A very rare broadside parody of a Harvard diploma, issued to graduating senior Charles Duncan Lamb by “Med. Fac.,” Harvard’s clandestine and long-lived Medical Faculty Society. The diploma was awarded on July 17, 1861—the very day Lamb received his legitimate Harvard degree—and combines the solemn apparatus of academic credentialing with a horned devil, ludicrous mock Latin, and repeated invocations of Satan.

The joke begins with the heading: the issuing authority styles itself “Harvard University at Cambridge,” but claims jurisdiction not only “in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts” but also “throughout the realms of Old Nick.” The conventional diploma salutation is similarly improved: “To all who shall read these letters, everlasting greetings in the Devil.” The artist adds a clever trompe l’oeil conceit, making the diploma appear to hang from a rod held by the devil himself: his head and clawed hands emerge above the sheet, while below appear his hairy legs, feet and curling tail.

The body text carries the conceit much further. Lamb is praised as a man of “diabolical genius” and, after the customary time devoted to the study and practice of medicine and the “tormenting of tyros,” is said to have undergone a private examination and publicly delivered a dissertation. Its manuscript title is difficult to decipher: the second word is clearly amputatione (“amputation”), but I have not been able to read the preceding word with confidence.

In any event, having demonstrated his proficiency in arte diabolica, Lamb is judged worthy of advancement. The President and Professors, styled “Brothers in the Devil,” thereupon admit him to the rank printed in large capitals as “Fellow (or “Member”) of the Medical Faculty”—and grant him “all the Rights, Honors and Privileges derived from Satan as Leader” belonging to his new dignity.

The “Medical Faculty”
Med. Fac. had begun more than four decades earlier, in 1818, when four members of the Harvard Class of 1820 gathered in Hollis Hall and amused themselves with a mock lecture. Benjamin Hosmer Hall’s A Collection of College Words and Customs (1851) offers a wonderful early account of the society, drawing heavily on a letter from an unnamed graduate who had served as Med. Fac. president in 1820. The writer recalled that the society’s purpose was “mere fun,” pursued through mock examinations, costumes, and burlesque lectures on “all conceivable and inconceivable subjects.” Degrees were conferred on members, while honorary degrees were bestowed liberally on outsiders. According to the same informant, “Diplomas were given … in ludicrous Latin,” accompanied by a large seal suspended from green ribbon.

Indeed, abuse of Latin was itself part of the joke. Hall calls the language of the society’s printed catalogues “piggish,” while a member of the Class of 1828 remembered receiving his invitation in “barbarous Latin.” The present diploma offers a small example of its own: the standard academic formula In cujus rei testimonium (“In testimony whereof”) has been scrambled into Cujus in rei Testimonium. Elsewhere the Latin is intelligible but used to ridiculous ends, as when the diploma solemnly offers “everlasting greetings in the Devil.” The catalogues likewise spoofed Harvard’s official triennial catalogues, complete with absurd learned titles, imaginary antiquity, and claims that Satan himself had sought advice from the august Senate of Med. Fac.

Harvard authorities attempted to suppress the society in 1834, but succeeded mainly in driving it underground. Its pranks could eventually cross squarely into criminal behavior: in May 1905 Harvard senior and Med. Fac. member Benjamin Joy was arrested following an attempt to carry off a roughly 200-pound bronze plaque from Phillips Brooks House in Harvard Yard. The ensuing scandal helped precipitate the “Agreement of 1905” that finally brought the society to an end. The Harvard University Archives now preserves a substantial Med. Fac. archive, including membership lists, minutes, descriptions of pranks, correspondence, catalogues, seals and—appropriately enough—Bibles “presumably stolen by group members.”

Lamb and his fellow “doctors”
The recipient can be securely identified as Charles Duncan Lamb (1841–1871), Harvard Class of 1861, son of Boston shipping merchant and New England Bank president Thomas Lamb. The date is particularly nice: the diploma is filled out XVII Julii MDCCCLXI, July 17, 1861, the day of Harvard’s actual Commencement.

Lamb was also a member of the Hasty Pudding Club. The bold signature at the foot of the diploma reads “John L. Bullard” and is almost certainly Lamb’s classmate John Lincoln Bullard, himself Secretary and “Poet” of the Hasty Pudding. Here Bullard signs as Pharisaeus—“Pharisee.” I have not yet been able to decipher with confidence the much fainter signature beside Praeses, above and to the right of Bullard’s.

By 1864 Lamb was a captain in the 56th Massachusetts Infantry, and on July 30 took part in the disastrous Union assault at the Crater before Petersburg. His superior officers were either wounded or captured, leaving Lamb in command of the regiment’s battered remnant. Soon afterward, during fighting around the Weldon Railroad, a Minié ball entered his neck and shattered his lower jaw. He survived but thereafter suffered chronic difficulty speaking and eating. His health gradually declined, and he died in 1871 at just thirty years of age.

A remarkable and entertaining Harvard survival.

Rarity and references
The diploma appears to be extraordinarily rare: It is not listed in OCLC, and I find no record of another having appeared on the antiquarian market. I find a single additional example held, not surprisingly, at the Harvard University Archives (call # HUD 3000 PF Med. Fac. Diploma). That example was issued in 1865 to Joseph Wheeler Reed of the Class of 1867.

Background from: “History by Degrees,” online at The Harvard Gazette, posted May 22, 2014. Benjamin Hosmer Hall, A Collection of College Words and Customs (Cambridge, Mass.: John Bartlett, 1851), pp. 198-207. Harvard University Archives finding aid, “Records of Med. Fac., 1812–1939 and [undated].” A. Haven, “Doctors of Destruction,” online at the Harvard Crimson, posted April, 13, 2005. “All the Necrology of Harvard College, 1869-1872,” online at GenealogyTrails.com.