"The Campbell heritage lives on". The Robert Campbell oration delivered on 8th May, 1973.

ROBERT CAMPBELL, if living today, would be well over one hundred years of age. He died in 1920 at the early age of 54 years, and in his 25 years of active work he built up not only for himself but also for this medical school a lasting surgical reputation. It would not be an overstatement if we said that he revolutionized surgery in Ulster The title of tonight's lecture some fifty years after his death might be "The Campbell Heritage Lives On" for those of us who have practised surgery here since his time are indeed the inheritors of a tradition based on his work. Campbell joined the staff of the Belfast Hospital for Sick Children (then in Queen Street) in 1897 as an assistant surgeon. One of his contemporaries has described him at work there "from nine in the morning until late in the afternoon, examining, treating and operating on . . . children". His work there gave him immense pleasure; he became devoted to children and was in turn beloved by them. I suppose that is why on the back of the Campbell Memorial Medal there appear the words of Hippocrates suggested by the then Vice Chancellor of the university, "Where there is love of man there is love of Art". This motto surrounds a plaque made by Miss Praegar of Holywood which shows a surgeon tenderly dressing the arm of a little child as it sits on its mother's lap. He is remembered particularly as the pioneer of aseptic surgery in Belfast. He quickly adopted the American novelty of rubber gloves when operating, and he was the first in Ulster to advocate the use of a face mask, which the French surgeons had suggested to keep their beards in check. His surgical interests were wide. He wrote on club hand, on the operative treatment of exophthalmic goitre, on acute appendicitis and on fractures of the radius but his most important contribution was iIk the field of the operative treatment of hernia in children and in the development of out-patient surgery. In 1899 Robert Campbell pointed out that the infant should and could have its inguinal hernia repaired at once; up to then it had been customary to wait until the child was 6-10 years of age. During this time it had worn a dirty truss of cotton or rubber, and in many cases the anxious mother had been told that the child must on no account cry for fear of strangulation. He published in 1904 a series of 114 cases and after his death there was found among his papers an analysis of 1500 cases with only one death and this was due to delayed chloroform poisoning. In this series about one-third were aged under three months and almost one-half under six months. Some time before 1909 he began to perform these operations in the out-patients' department. The quantity of outpatient surgery became so great that a special outpatient operating theatre had to be built. This