Origin of cases at Harvard

A friend was reading a draft of my case on Google.org and asked why we did cases at the Kennedy School.  I realized I had no idea where cases come from, so decided to dig a little and - voila! - found this great article.

http://harvardmagazine.com/2003/09/making-the-case-html

"
The Law School led the way. A newly appointed dean began to teach with cases in 1870, reversing a long history of lecture and drill. He viewed law as a science and appellate court decisions as the “specimens” from which general principles should be induced, and he assembled a representative set of court decisions to create the first legal casebook. To ensure that class time was used productively, he introduced the question-and-answer format now called the Socratic method.

The Business School followed 50 years later. Founded in 1908, it did not adopt cases until 1920, when its second dean, a Law School graduate, championed their use. After convincing a marketing professor to create the first business casebook, he then provided funding for a broader program of casewriting, built around real business issues and yet-to-be-made decisions. That program produced cases in multiple fields and their use in virtually all courses by the end of the decade.

The Medical School began using cases only in 1985. All were designed to cement students’ understanding of basic science by linking it immediately to practical problems—typically, the case histories of individual patients. These cases formed the foundation of the school’s revolutionary “New Pathway” curriculum that shifted students’ pre-clinical years away from lectures toward tutorials and active learning."