The history of the Royal Belfast Hospital for Sick Children. The Queen Street days.

I MUST first acknowledge the great honour that has been done me by the invitation to deliver the Sir Thomas and Lady Edith Dixon Memorial Lecture. When I accepted the invitation I requested that I should be permitted to deliver the lecture under the auspices of the Ulster Medical Society so that I might continue the story of the Royal Belfast Hospital for Sick Children at the domestic hearth of Ulster medicine. f am grateful to the president and council for granting my request. The history of the hospital is a proper subject for a Dixon lecture as both Sir Thomas Dixon and his wife were generous supporters of its work, giving not only money and goods but also of their time. Brice Smyth, the hospital's first attending physician, testified in public in 1910 to Sir Thomas Dixon's active interest as a member of the Board of Management. Lady Dixon founded the Linen League in order to supply household linen for the hospital and on more than one occasion provided the New Year dinner and tea. She was also a member of the Board. Much of the story I have to tell is of events that were shaped by the Dixons and their contemporaries. In the year 1879 Miss Lennox, the first matron of the (Royal) Belfast Hospital for Sick Children, received a letter from Miss Florence Nightingale in whose school of nursing at St. Thomas' Hospital she had once been a pupil. This letter reads: