What Makes Boston Like No Place Else
These features and landmarks make Boston stand out from the rest
By Kimberly Blanton, The Boston Globe | Published: 11/18/2008
The Boston metropolitan area is home to numerous colleges and universities, including the world-famous Harvard University.
Education and Research
The Boston metropolitan area has some 60 colleges and universities and an astounding variety. Some are world-famous: Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Some are highly specialized: Babson College for entrepreneurship and Berklee College of Music for musical training. Many are obscure to those outside the city limits: Mount Ida College and Wheelock College. Boston is also distinguished for having a total of eight research universities and world-class research institutions such as Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Harvard, founded in 1636 by the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was the first college in the American colonies. With that came "firsts" too numerous to count, but they include:
- In 1817, one of the world's first law schools.
- In 1867, the nation's first school of dentistry.
- In 1875, the world's first experimental psychology laboratory.
- In 1990, the nation's first college to offer landscape architecture courses.
- In 1908, the nation's first business program limited to college graduates.
- In 1937, the nation's first graduate program in American Studies.
- In 1954, researchers performed the first human kidney transplant.
- In 1967, the nation's first college to offer an undergraduate degree in folklore and mythology.
- In 1989, the Divinity School offers the nation's first doctoral program in religion, gender and culture.
The higher educational and research institutions that have sprouted in Harvard's wake have also achieved many firsts:
- In 1846, the first surgery performed with an anesthesia (ether) was performed at Massachusetts General Hospital. The removal of the patient's mouth tumor was a success and painless.
- In 1848, Boston University's New England Female Medical College was one of the nation's first medical schools for women.
- In 1865, MIT was the first to offer an architecture curriculum.
- In 1877, Boston University was first in awarding a Ph.D. to a woman, the classical scholar Helen Magill.
- In 1879, Dr. Solomon Carter Fuller became the first black psychiatrist as a graduate of the (renamed) College of Medicine at Boston University.
- In 1966, Babson offered the nation's first course in entrepreneurship.
- In 1973, two MIT professors were involved in research confirming the existence of quarks.
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