The foundation and early development of the Royal Belfast Hospital for sick children.

I AM deeply sensible of the great honour the executive committee and trustees of the Robert Campbell Memorial Fund have done me by the award of the Memorial Prize and Medal. Each recipient has the duty of delivering the Robert Campbell Memorial Oration before the Ulster Medical Society, of which Robert Campbell was President in the session 1918-19. It gives me especial pleasure that the honour has fallen to me during the presidency of my old schoolfellow and fellow-student. Dr. R. W. M. Strain. The first four orators were close personal friends and colleagues of Robert Campbell. Their successors have included a few who were his students and many who knew him only by reputation. Although I must place myself in the last category seeing that Robert Campbell had died four years before I became a medical student yet I can claim that the name Campbell was a household word to me in my youth. Members of the Campbell family and of my own family had been connected in friendship since the time of the installation of the Reverend Robert Campbell in Templepatrick Presbyterian Church in 1796. The man we commemorate was his grand nephew. To me the name connotes a living tradition which embraces a span of more than one hundred and seventy years. Robert Campbell served the Royal Belfast Hospital for Sick Children for almost 23 years when it was in Queen Street. He was appointed honorary assistant attending surgeon in September 1897 when John S. Morrow was promoted to be full surgeon, and when Morrow resigned in October 1898 Campbell became full surgeon. The junior vacancy was filled by Andrew Fullerton. The year 1898 which saw Campbell's promotion also saw the appointment as matron of the hospital of Miss Amy Isobel McTaggart. She resigned in 1906 to