School of Medicine (Trinity College Dublin)

The School of Medicine at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland (known until 2005 as the School of Physic), is the oldest medical school in Ireland. Founded in the early eighteenth century, it was originally situated at the site of the current Berkeley Library. As well as providing an undergraduate degree in medicine, the school provides undergraduate courses in physiotherapy, occupational therapy, radiation therapy, human nutrition & dietetics and human health & disease, over 20 taught postgraduate courses, and research degrees.

History

Medical training has taken place at Trinity College since the seventeenth century, originally on a rather unremarkable basis; extant records suggest that by 1616 only one medical degree had been conferred. In a letter to James Ussher in 1628, Provost William Bedell commented, "I suppose it hath been an error all this time to neglect the faculties of law and physic and attend only to the ordering of one poor College of Divines." From 1618 the post of "Medicus" had existed among the Fellows, this post later being formalised under Bedell's revised college statutes in 1628 and by royal letters patent in 1637, but in practice the office was usually held by Junior Fellows who did not hold medical degrees and who participated in no real sense in medical education; for example, the first Fellow to be chosen Medicus, John Temple (son of the then-provost of the college, Sir William Temple), went on to pursue a prominent legal career. The Public (later Regius) Professorship of Physic was for the most part used as ceremonial title for a practising doctor.

A 17th-century manuscript preserved in the Trinity College Library, describing the ceremonies accompanying conferral of degrees, makes no mention of graduates in medicine.

The first recorded named holder of a Dublin medical degree was John Stearne, a Trinity graduate who had trained as a doctor in England (possibly at Cambridge), and was appointed a Fellow upon returning to Trinity in 1651. From 1662 until his death in 1669 he was Professor of Physic, and during this time was instrumental in the foundation of a college of physicians, which later became the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland; this institution had originally functioned as a daughter institution of Trinity College, located at the former Trinity Hall on Hoggen Green (now College Green). Trinity Hall had been intended as a place of residence and tuition for students of the college, but a dispute arose, as the property fell into disuse and disrepair following the rebellion of 1641, and Dublin Corporation demanded its return, as the conditions by which the Corporation had provided it to the college were not being upheld.