The Story of the Ulster Hospital
It is to me a source of very great pride and pleasure to be chosen by the Staff of The Royal Victoria Hospital to give the Scott-Heron Lecture, and, Sir, your kind words do much to allay the acute apprehension which afflicts me at this moment. Francis Hugh Scott, whose bounty has led to the establishment of this lecture, was born in 1865, the son of Robert Scott and Caroline Louise Heron. He was a student of this Hospital, where he won the Malcolm Exhibition, and I am told that he was always particularly proud that he won the Students' Medal at the Ulster Hospital, thus forming a link between himself as our benefactor and the subject of the 1959 lecture. He practised for fifty years in Saintfield, and died in 1946 at the ripe age of 81 years. He was a man of great erudition, with a passion for books. I am old enough to remember that my own teachers held him in great esteem. His bequest was made for the purposes of medical education, and I submit that it comes within his generous provision to look back at the origin and to study the progress of the little hospital which he loved so well. It has been said, probably by Mr. W. M. Thackeray, that "If you wgnt to make a thing really dull, say all there is to be said about it." This is one danger which I may evade this evening, because so much of the early history of the Ulster Hospital is already lost. It was, probably, the first children's hospital to be opened in Belfast, and the story which I shall now try to tell you is one of struggle and achievement, marred by tragedy and frustration. So much has happened in the eighty-seven years which have elapsed that I can spare but little time to remind you of the civic and sociological background against which the Hospital had its origin. Belfast then had a population of about 220,000 people (almnost exactly half of our present population), and was in many respects a thriving and prosperous town. The Belfast General Hospital, now The Royal Victoria Hospital, had been founded in 1792, and at the time I speak of had approximately 176 beds for adults. There were children among the inmates of the workhouse and infirmary on the Lisburn Road, but there is little information …