Harold C. Ernst
1856 - 1922
Harold Clarence Ernst (1856-1922) earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard College in 1876 and an MD in 1880.
He was prominent in the field of medicine. He taught bacteriology at the Harvard Medical School from 1885 to 1922. He was probably the first to lecture on the subject as a part of the regular course curriculum in an American medical school. Ernst was responsible for the organization of a bacteriology laboratory under the auspices of the City of Boston, which initially worked toward detection and prevention of diphtheria.
Ernst edited the Journal of Medical Research from 1896 to 1922, and he served as director of scholarships in the Harvard Medical School in 1922.
Ernst was also prominent as a collector of sundials and microscopes. The latter became the basis of the Ernst-Lewis Collection of Microscopes currently in CHSI. The former is known as the Ernst Collection of Sundials and is also at CHSI. (For more information about each of the two collections, please see their respective files.)
According to R. Newton Mayall, Ernst began by collecting watches but the acquisition of a portable sundial changed all that. No more watches were collected. The number of dials grew to over 130.