Anthony Traill (1838-1914), the first Provost to confer degrees on Women Graduates.

Anthony Traill was born into a Scotch-Irish family at Ballylough House near Bushmills in county Antrim in November 1838. At the age of twenty he entered Trinity College Dublin to study engineering, but he was a professional student who passed through all the faculties and took legal and medical degrees in 1864-1870. He applied his knowledge of physics when advising his brother William who was building the Portrush-Bushmills electric railway. Though he took time off to indulge his athletic abilities, he steeped himself in College affairs and became Provost in March 1904, a post he held until his death in October 1914. His outstanding contribution whilst holding that post was to welcome women with university training into graduation.

Joseph Erlanger (1874-1965): the cardiovascular investigator who won a Nobel Prize in neurophysiology.

Born in San Francisco in 1874 into the family of German immigrants in which he was the only one to proceed beyond elementary education, Joseph Erlanger graduated from the University of California (Berkeley) in 1894. He was about to enter the local Cooper Medical School when he was told that the new medical school in Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore) aimed to surpass all others, and there he graduated and was later coached for a career in academic life by William H Howell (1860-1945). In due course he held the Chairs of Physiology in the University of Wisconsin (Madison) and Washington University at St Louis, Missouri. He showed that the Bundle of His is indeed the functional link between the atria and the ventricles in the mammalian heart and that the Korotkoff sounds are produced by a 'breaker' phenomenon resulting from instability of the pulse wave in a partially occluded artery. With Herbert S Gasser (1888-1963) he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1944 for their work on action currents in peripheral nerve fibres. The history of science occupied him during his retirement. He died at St Louis in 1965.

James Alexander Lindsay (1856-1931), and his clinical axioms and aphorisms.

John Alexander Lindsay was born at Fintona, county Tyrone in 1856, and at the age of 23 he graduated in medicine at the Royal University of Ireland. After two years in London and Europe he returned to Belfast to join the staff at the Royal Victoria Hospital and in 1899 he was appointed to the professorship of medicine. He was valued by the students for his clarity and by his colleagues for his many extracurricular contributions to the medical profession in the positions entrusted to him. He published monographs on Diseases of the Lungs, and the Climatic Treatment of Consumption, but his later Medical Axioms show his deep appreciation of studied clinical observation. Although practice was changing in the new century Lindsay displayed an ability to change with the new requirements, as evidenced by his lecture on electrocardiography as president of the section of medicine of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland in 1915. He was impressed by the way the string galvanometer changed attention from stenosis and incompetence of the valves to the cardiac musculature, but rightly suspected that there was more to be told about the state of the myocardium than Einthoven's three leads revealed. His death occurred in Belfast in 1931.

The frustration of Lady Aberdeen in her crusade against tuberculosis in Ireland.

When in his Annual Report for 1905 the Registrar General for Ireland pointed out to the lately arrived Lord Lieutenant, The Earl of Aberdeen, that annually in every 100 deaths in Ireland 16 were victims of tuberculosis, Lady Aberdeen took notice. In March 1907 she founded the WNHA with the clear duty of taking part in the fight against the appalling ravages of that disease, and organised a Tuberculosis Exhibition the following October. And so began a campaign that led to the building of Peamount Sanatorium in county Dublin, the Allan Ryan Hospital at Ringsend, and the Collier Dispensary in the city centre. However, the Irish parliamentarians at Westminster emasculated the Tuberculosis Prevention (Ireland) Act 1908 by ensuring that notification was not made compulsory. Passage of the National Health Insurance Act (1911) necessitated changes that resulted in the Tuberculosis Prevention (Ireland) Act (1913), but the crucial shortcomings of the earlier Act were not rectified: notification was necessary but still not compulsory. Lady Aberdeen recognised this serious flaw she was powerless to correct, and turned to propaganda, editing Sláinte, a monthly magazine founded in January 1909 by the WNHA, and editing a three-volume account of Ireland's Crusade Against Tuberculosis (1908-1909).

Archibald Billing (1791-1881) MD FRCP FRS: bedside teaching at the London Hospital (1822).

After graduation at Trinity College Dublin in 1814 Archibald Billing, who was born in County Dublin, settled in London. His Dublin MD (1818) was incorporated at Oxford and he taught at the London Hospital where, when appointed Senior Physician in 1822, he introduced teaching at the patients' bedsides. He ceased to lecture in 1836 when he was invited to become a member of the Senate of the University of London. He published papers on a variety of clinical subjects but is remembered for First Principles of Medicine (1831) that went through six editions. His friends among the operatic artists included Niccolo Paganini, and The Science of Jems, Jewels, Coins and Medals (1867) was the work of a connoisseur. He lived in retirement for many years before he died at the age of 90 at 34 Park Lane, London, on 2 September 1881.

On first looking into auriculo-ventricular asynchrony.

Walter Gaskell's demonstration in 1882 that it was possible to block the passage of contraction from auricle to ventricle in the frog heart by means of a clamp spurred Joseph Erlanger (1906) to prevent, by similar means, impulse conduction through the bundle of (Wilhelm) His jun. (1893) in the mammalian heart. With a miniaturized polygraph to record the jugular and arterial pulsation, James Mackenzie (1902) displayed various grades of heart block in the human heart. His results were confirmed by Thomas Lewis using Willem Einthoven's (1903) ECG in 1911. But without instrumental help, Robert Spittal (1804-1852) recounted a case of reversible auriculo-ventricular block in 1830.

Hallaran's circulating swing.

William Saunders Hallaran (c.1765-1825) was physician superintendent at the County and City of Cork Lunatic Asylum for 40 years, where he distinguished between mental insanity and organic (systemic) delirium. In treatment he used emetics and purgatives, digitalis and opium, the shower bath and exercise, and argued that patients should be saved from 'unavoidable sloth' by mental as well as manual occupation. However, it is as an exponent of the circulating swing, proposed by Erasmus Darwin and used by Joseph Cox, that he is remembered. His best results were achieved, as he recorded in An Enquiry in 1810, by inducing sleep in mania of recent onset, but perhaps his most enduring observation was that some of his patients enjoyed the rotatory experience, and he had enough sense to allow the use of the swing as a mode of amusement.

Brice Clarke (1895-1975) and the control of tuberculosis in Northern Ireland.

Among the problems facing Northern Ireland after its foundation in 1920, one of the most daunting was the prevalence of tuberculosis, a chronic communicable disease with highest mortality among young women and men in the prime of life. Over a quarter of a century, legislative changes tardily responded, and in spite of, or because of its magnitude, Brice Clarke (1895-1975) devoted himself to the challenge. After decorated service in the Great War of 1914-19 he returned to finish his medical studies in Queen's University Belfast and held hospital appointments until he became Chief Tuberculosis Officer for Belfast and soon afterwards Director of Tuberculosis Services in Northern Ireland. For twenty years he was an enthusiastic proponent of collapse therapy, and even before the new chemotherapy hastened the natural decline in the tuberculosis epidemic he trumpeted the value of properly equipped chest clinics and generously funded welfare schemes. His garden at Hillsborough could not contain him in retirement; he set off on a slow boat to Japan in 1962, and returned to pen biographical sketches of famous consumptives until his death in 1975 at the age of 80.

Jonathan Osborne (1794-1864) MD FRCPI: a crypto-neurologist.

Jonathan Osborne was born in Dublin and educated in Trinity College Dublin, where he became Professor of Materia Medica. As physician to Sir Patrick Dun's and Mercer Hospitals he reported extensively on those patients who came under his care. In his native city he is remembered for the instruments he devised, for his studies on dropsies (particularly albuminuric nephritis), and for his therapeutic approach to epilepsy and neuralgia. It is his thorough analysis of a patient with conduction aphasia in 1833, however, which has stood the test of time.

Thomas Wrigley Grimshaw (1839-1900). Registrar general 1879-1900.

Thomas Wrigley Grimshaw was born in Whitehouse, County Antrim, in 1839, and learned his medicine at the Dublin School of Medicine when its reputation was at its highest. If his teachers strayed from the art of bedside medicine into science it was into meteorology that had been revived by Thomas Sydenham, the 'English Hippocrates' in the seventeenth century. When Grimshaw was appointed Registrar General for Ireland in 1879 he diverted attention from the acute epidemics of zymotic diseases to chronic pulmonary affections that numerically were far more deadly. Cartography became an obsession with him, and he used it to show that Ireland was divided by phthisis into east and west. Koch's 'great discovery' in 1882 that tuberculosis is an infection not a 'constitutional' disease made him change his long-held views, and in the decade before his death in 1900 at Carrickmines, County Dublin, he became an active advocate of the new knowledge, distressed by the fact that thriving Belfast and its hinterland had the highest mortality from phthisis in Ireland. His concern for the health of young girls employed in large numbers in the linen factories was matched by his landmark advocacy of young ladies anxious to gain the licence to practise medicine in Great Britain and Ireland.

Intensive care 1650: the revival of Anne Greene (c. 1628-59).

On a cold December day in 1650, 22-year-old Anne Greene was hanged in Oxford. When taken down after half an hour, she was found to show signs of life and over the next few days William Petty (1623-87), Thomas Willis (1621-75), Ralph Bathurst (1620-74) and Henry Clerke (1622-87) ministered to her full recovery. She was later pardoned of the charge of infanticide and, with the coffin wherein she had lain as a trophy, went into the country, became the subject not only of a prose and poetic narrative but also of a woodcut. Anne married happily, bore three children and lived until 1659. A combination of low-body temperature and external (pedal) cardiac massage after her failed execution, it is suggested, helped to keep her alive until the arrival of the physicians who had come to make an anatomical dissection but serendipitously won golden opinions.

Francis Thompson (1859-1907): a medical truant and his troubled heart.

Francis Thompson was born in 1859 in Preston and grew to manhood in Ashton-under-Lyne in Lancashire. After six years registered as a medical student at Owens College, Manchester, he set off for London to retrace the footsteps of Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859). His early experience in London followed closely that of the earlier English Opium Eater until he was rescued by Wilfrid Meynell (1852-1948) who recognized his nascent literary flair. Thompson's poetry earned him respect and reputation and his prose brought him a reasonable income, but he never weaned himself from laudanum and he died of tuberculosis in 1907. Not every truant is honoured by a lapidary inscription in his alma mater, even though he may be overlooked in an arbitrary census.

Robert Dyer Lyons (I 826-1886), microscopist, meteorologist, physician, parliamentarian.

When the attention of Robert Dyer Lyons was drawn to the medical value of the microscope in 1850, he trained himself in its use, and after annually reviewing its recent discoveries he was despatched as chief pathologist to the Army of the East in April 1855. His Report (1856) was a feather in his cap when he returned from the Crimea to Dublin and took up a professorship in the recently founded Catholic University medical school. Popularity as a teacher and success as a physician broadened his interests to national affairs, and he advocated increased funding for university education and re-afforestation. He was elected a Liberal M P for Dublin in 1880 but did not stand for re-election in 1886, the year of his death.