6 - The Departments of Surgery and Medicine

Summary

The RF's concentration on the Biochemistry Laboratory and the Department of Therapeutics was a product of considerable institutional history and Rockefeller strategy.As usual the RF picked out its man, in this case Meakins (that he held the therapeutics chair was coincidental). Although there were problems in London the RF had been able to support new medical and surgical units there, notably because they were unencumbered by the burden of history. In Edinburgh it tried to create units using the premier medical and surgical professorships but these were long-standing chairs with intricate relations with the Infirmary and with incumbents who had their own agendas. Nor following Meakins, in the case of medicine,was there an individual with whom the Foundation was comfortable. Because of these factors the result, certainly in the medical case,was far less satisfactory than the RF would have wanted. In this chapter I examine the support for surgery, the struggles around the Chair of Medicine, and the physical reconstruction of the Medical Faculty after 1928.

From the Rockefeller point of view, the reconstruction of surgical teaching and research was, after a great deal of bargaining, a relative success story. There were two departments of surgery in the Medical Faculty headed by a Chair of Systematic Surgery and a Chair of Clinical Surgery. Both of these chairs dated from the early nineteenth century. In many ways they were quite independent. When the Department of Surgery is referred to in the contemporary literature it sometimes means the Chair of Systematic Surgery and sometimes both chairs, either because of colloquial usage or because both were included in the Department of Surgery of the RIE. Context usually makes things clear. The Department of Systematic Surgery had a large lecture theatre in the Medical School.The Professor of Clinical Surgery gave his lectures in the Infirmary. Here, behind the operating theatre, the surgeons had their own pathological laboratory for histological and bacteriological work. In the hospital, appointments to the position of Assistant and Ordinary Surgeon were governed by the same complex rules that governed the appointment of physicians. This meant that the Infirmary Managers had a major voice in these appointments and that promotion to Ordinary Surgeon was based on the position of the Assistants in the pecking order.