The distinctiveness of Belfast medicine and its medical school.

PROLOGUE On 8 October 1835, exactly 150 years ago, the 'Board of the Faculty of the Medical Department' of the Royal Belfast Academical Institution (hereinafter Inst) met for the first time the first faculty board meeting of the first medical school in Ireland outside Dublin. Five 'professors' constituted the Board John L. Drummond MD (anatomy and physiology, and botany), Thomas Andrews MD (chemistry), J.D. Marshall MD (materia media and pharmacy), Robert Little MD (midwifery and diseases of women and children), and John McDonnell (surgery). They had much in common: sharing an Ulster commercial, professional or farming background they shared also a confidence in the enterprise though prudently tempered with the hope that the persistence which had sustained their ambitions through the disappointments of the past two decades had been worthwhile and that a healthy and virile child had now been born which under their care would grow to robust manhood. Today's Faculty of Medicine at Queen's is the direct descendant of that precarious yet optimistic board: optimistic, in the almost arrogant confidence of its members; precarious, in that in four short years it lost John McDonnell and his successor (Surgeon Ferrar), saw Robert Little quit Belfast under a cloud albeit a feathery one, and gained only three (out of an optimistically proposed twelve) new members, one being a replacement Robert Coffey MD (surgery), William Mateer MD (botany, from the overburdened Drummond), and Henry MacCormac MD (theory and practice of physic). The Board stamped on the school from its very beginning certain distinctive features which microcosmed the circumstances and structure of the broader Ulster society which spawned and succoured it, and these can be traced to the present day. It seems appropriate that, on the Faculty's sesquicentennial anniversary, certain fundamentals of its foundation and development should be recalled and its distinctive features identified.