This year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the opening of Ninewells Hospital and Medical School. One of the hospital’s strengths is its close relationship with the School which has a long history and a very important one in the context of the University. This blog from the University Archives explains more.
From the 1860s onwards there were serious campaigns for university education to be made available in Dundee, either by founding a new institution or by moving some or all of the University of St Andrews to the City. The latter idea got some significant support in the early 1870s, with a key argument being that the proximity to a major hospital, Dundee Royal Infirmary, would allow St Andrews to offer practical medical education. In the end a separate University College was founded in Dundee in 1881, but the medical issue was one of the reasons that made a link between the two institutions desirable. This was finalised in 1897 when University College, Dundee became a college of the University of St Andrews. A Faculty of Medicine was established and in 1898 a Conjoint School of Medicine was founded. The first students to graduate under the new arrangements would do so in 1901.
This was not quite a new start. By 1887 some University College students were studying medicine with the ultimate aim of gaining degrees from other universities. Laura Stewart Sandeman, who obtained her medical degree from Edinburgh in 1900, had actually undertaken the bulk of her studies at University College. She would go on to have a distinguished medical career and became a prominent social reformer and politician in Aberdeen.
Work soon started on a new building on the University College campus. The site chosen in 1899 was that of the original College Hall, which had been converted from the former St John’s Free Church. The old building was demolished and the foundation stone of the Medical School was laid by Andrew Carnegie in 1902. Progress on the £20,000 building went well and it was opened by Lord Balfour of Burleigh, Chancellor of the University of St Andrews, on 17 October 1904. 120 years later, and now known as the Old Medical School, it remains a prominent landmark on the campus.
The extent to which the Medical School was part of University College, Dundee would be a long running sore between the College leadership and the University of St Andrews authorities. In the 1940s plans emerged for a new Medical School to be built beside a revamped Dundee Royal Infirmary. One idea was that this would become a separate college of St Andrews, possibly to be called St Luke’s. This suggestion caused outrage at University College, and was strongly opposed by Principal Wimberley who feared that, if as some suggested it would eventually offer non-medical courses, it would be used to replace University College. The situation was resolved in 1954 when the Medical School in Dundee was made part of the new Queen’s College, Dundee.
However the 50 year old Medical School Building and the facilities at Dundee Royal Infirmary were clearly becoming outdated. Teaching had also started at Maryfield Hospital, but it also suffered from age. Moves had begun for Dundee to get a new hospital and it made sense for a new medical school to be located at the hospital.
The building of Ninewells was something of an epic saga, but in 1974 patients began to be treated at the new hospital which had been designed with teaching in mind. At the same time Medical School departments were moving into the new premises on the site which the press hailed as one of the most advanced medical schools in Europe.
Since the 1970s the Medical School has gone from strength to strength and has been refurbished and expanded several times, with a major extension being completed in 2014.