A Century of Service - Eoin O'Brien

Medical Education
The Voluntary Hospital Movement and the Dublin School
The regulation of the practice of medicine lay with the College of Physicians,
founded in 1654, which together with the University of Dublin, granted degrees in
medicine. Many aspiring doctors chose to go abroad for medical training to
Edinburgh, London, Paris, Vienna, or to Leyden where the mighty Boerhaave
influenced generations of European doctors. 10
The medical school at the University of Dublin was established in 1711, but it did
not become an effective force in medical education until the early nineteenth century
under the influence of men of the calibre of James Macartney, Whitley Stokes and
Robert Perceval. Perceval had the vision to realise that without a hospital for the
teaching of clinical medicine, Irish students would continue to go abroad for medical
training, and he was largely responsible for the Physic Act of 1800 which brought
about the building of Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital. 11
In the hierarchy of medicine, the physicians ruled supreme, and blind to the benefits
of future development of the profession they protected their privileged position with
an intense chauvinism. The midwives, apothecaries and surgeons remained much
the inferior members of the profession. 12 Before the founding of the College of
Surgeons, surgery was treated as a trade and the surgeons were incorporated by
charter in a body with the apothecaries, the barbers and periwig-makers. Training
for surgery was through apprenticeship to an established surgeon, a practice that
persisted until 1844. 13
The first sign of revolt in Irish surgery is attributed to Sylvester O’Halloran, a
Limerick surgeon, who, in 1765, made proposals for “the Advancement of Surgery
in Ireland.” 14 Shortly afterwards William Dease, a Dublin surgeon, criticised the
University of Dublin for failing to teach surgery and applauded the French surgeons
who “by procuring a total separation from that preposterous union with the
company of barbers” had been enabled to raise the standard of surgery. 15 Samuel
Croker-King, surgeon to Dr Steevens’ hospital was instrumental in petitioning
parliament for a charter for a College of Surgeons, which was granted on February
11, 1784. Croker-King was elected first president of the Royal College of Surgeons
in Ireland, which met for the first time in the boardroom of the Rotunda
Hospital on March 2, 1784. 16 The rise of this institute when compared to the
apathetic performance of its elders the Royal College of Physicians and the
University of Dublin, is quite remarkable. It was fortunate in having on its early
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