Medical Education in 1870

In 1870, a leading medical school in the US needed to re-evaluate the quality of education they were providing. This lead to a great debate among the faculty over whether a student applying to the medical school should be literate or not. With a majority vote of 5 out of 9 faculty, the medical school decided that literacy should not be made a requirement for admission. The name of this medical school was Harvard.
This gives us a little historical glimpse of how widespread literacy was in the US. (or wasn't)