Burden's Ghost

IN 1906 the founder of antenatal care, Dr. J. W. Ballantyne, read a valedictory address to the Edinburgh Obstetric Society. It took the form of a hypothetical, highly imaginative telephone conversation with the unknown President who should occupy the Chair thirty-four years later, in 1940. As it happened the normal activlties of the Edinburgh Society were suspended during the war years. But in 1946, Professor R. W. Johnstone, then Professor of Obstetrics at Edinburgh, was the President and delivered a valedictory address. In it "evoking," to quote his own words, "Ballantyne's spirit without unduly disturbing his rest," he conducted his predecessor's ghost round the Edinburgh Medical School of 1946. "Of the altruistic instincts," Osler once said, "veneration is not the most highly developed at the present day; but I hold strongly with the statement that it is the sign of a dry age when the great men of the past are held in light esteem." Sharing this view, I should like to follow Professor Johnstone's example and evoke the spirit of my predecessor, William Burden, the first professor of Midwifery in the Queen's College of Belfast, and show him how the seeds he had sown had grown into flourishing trees. To most of our Fellows and Members the name of William Burden perhaps conveys little. The only child of Dr. Henry Burden, he was born in India in 1798. On the death of his father and mother when he was 12 years old, he came to Belfast to live with his three aunts, the Misses Burden. After being apprenticed to business, he studied medicine under Dr. James McDonnell in the old General Hospital, and then proceeded to Glasgow where he gained his M.D. Returning to Belfast about 1830, he was elected a member of the Belfast Medical Society, the forerunner of this Society. For a short time he practised in Newry, In