Two Sons of the First Congregation

The population of Ireland was originally Roman Catholic but was diluted after the Elizabethan campaigns by Anglicans and the Plantation of Ulster by Scottish Presbyterians. While there may have been a Presbyterian church near the North Gate in either Hercules Street or North Street in Belfast, the well documented but later meeting houses were established late in the seventeenth century in Rosemary Street, where the church stands today. Two churches were built after the original one (the First Congregation). The first of these was built because the original could not contain all the congregation and the second because of doctrinal differences. Confession of Faith, he lived a life of controversy. He married a wealthy widow and had three sons, one of whom, Alexander Henry born in 1728, became a doctor. (Fig 1). Where the young Haliday received his early education is not known but it was probably at the hands of the Reverend Drennan. He followed his father and many other Ulstermen to Glasgow University where he matriculated in 1743 and graduated MA, MD in 1751, aged twenty three. This does not mean that he gained his clinic experience in Glasgow, as the first hospital there was built in 1794. Haliday wrote to Cullen from Belfast in 1751 stating that he had been in Paris when " the news of your establishment in the University of Glasgow reached me ". This may have been in 1750 when Cullen was appointed Professor of Medicine. The official date given for Cullen taking up the Chair of Medicine is 1751. Haliday's letter is reproduced in a biography of Cullen, but this is only an extract from it. The original is in the University of Glasgow and outlines his undergraduate career and is best recorded in his own words. " ….. in the beginning of my Education I passed four winters happily and I hope not idly in Glasgow-for the last two you may remember (if time and distance of situation have left you any remembrance of one) I was chiefly engaged in the medical-very under your direction-the Summer between these and the one which succeeded the last I improved as well as I could in the shop of our principal apothecary in this place-the next winter was spent in Edinburgh, where I attended with some care Mr Monroe, Dr Rutherford (both his college and his clinic lectures) and which was of more advantage …