The open window : a paper read to the British T.B. Assoc. at its annual meeting in Belfast, in June, 1948 / [Robert Marshall].

  • Marshall, Robert.
Date:
1948
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The open window : a paper read to the British T.B. Assoc. at its annual meeting in Belfast, in June, 1948 / [Robert Marshall]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Reprinted jrom “Tlte Ulster Medical Journal,” November, 1948 The Open Window By Robert Marshall, m.d., f.r.c.p.lond., f.r.c.p i., d.p.h. zA Pap er read to the British Tuberculosis Association at its Annual Meeting in Belfast, in June, 1948 Some months ago Dr. Brice Clarke invited me on your behalf to be present at this meeting and gave me the privilege of addressing you on some subject of local, medical, historical interest. A few days later I received a very kind letter from . Dr. Stephen Hall, in which he indicated his belief that the Belfast Medical School had produced some notable and eccentric figures in the last century, and suggested that one or more of these might form a fit subject for a short paper. My first : reaction was to agree at once that our school had produced some notable charac¬ ters, but I wondered just what he meant by the word eccentric, so 1 looked it up 1 in a dictionary and found the following definition : “not conforming to the ordinary rules of conduct; out of the ordinary, odd, original, whimsical; so odd, and so different from others as to be considered strange in the head; slightly crazy.” It was, on the face of it, scarcely complimentary to us to suggest that we had a large proportion of doctors who were slightly crazy, but in all fairness to Dr. Hall, we must admit that he credited us with at least an equal number who were notable. It occurs to one, too, that sometimes that which is regarded as eccentric or even slightly crazy in one generation, may be strictly orthodox in the next; and that is one reason why I should like to talk to you for a little while this evening about Dr. Henry MacCormac, who1 was considered by many during his own life-time to be eccentric, but who was a very great man and a notable physician in this or any age. Henry MacCormac was born in County Armagh in 1800 or 1802, the son of John MacCormac, a linen-merchant, who was the son of Cornelius MacCormac, an officer in the Royal Navy. He was almost certainly a pupil of Armagh Royal School, but has left it on record that he had few grateful memories of his pupil- ship.1 The Royal School’s list of scholars of that period is not available. He qualified in medicine in Edinburgh University in 1824 and studied in Dublin and Paris as well. He then went on a visit to Africa, journeying from the Cape of Good Hope to Sierra Leone overland, and nearly succumbed to an attack of jungle fever on the way. He also visited America twice before he commenced piactice in Belfast, where he was appointed a physician to the Bellast General Hospital, which is now the Royal Victoria Hospital, in 1830. It may have been because ol his experience in tropical diseases that he was given the task of taking charge ol the special hospital for cholera in the 1832 epidemic. “In the autumn of 1830, as Dr. A. G. Malcolm2 has recorded, “intelligence reached these shores, that the Asiatic cholera had crossed the Russian frontier and was steadily marching in a