Faculty of Medicine (1876 - 1989)

The University of Melbourne Faculty of Medicine was established in 1876.

It took the place of the Medical School Committee which had been responsible for administering training in medicine at the university since the first intake of students in 1862.

Image source: University of Melbourne Medical School Centenary 1962, from plate on frontispiece

The newly constituted Faculty of Medicine met for the first time in June 1876. It consisted of the professors and lecturers in the medical course and all members of the University Council who were legally qualified medical practitioners. One of its first actions was to elect Professor George Halford dean of the faculty. Another early action was to organise clinical training for students at the Melbourne Hospital.

Over the next few years, changes made to the five-year course in medicine and to the facilities for tuition and study both at the university and outside it, were mainly designed to ensure that medical students were further exposed to clinical practice and to new thinking, for example about how to achieve sepsis and antisepsis when undertaking surgery.

Further changes to the curriculum awaited a trip to Europe by Professor Halford in 1881. On his return, he and Harry Allen prepared a report on the condition of the Melbourne medical course and proposed a series of recommendations which the Faculty adopted. The proposals included the creation of two professorships - one in physiology, and the other in anatomy and pathology - the latter to be divided as soon as possible to allow for a professor of anatomy, and for a professor of pathology. A number of new positions were also created for clinical lecturers in medicine and surgery. These were designed to ensure that students received appropriate clinical supervision during their medical training rather than the ad hoc situation that applied previously. The Faculty also agreed to numerous changes to the subjects taught during the course, and the timing of training in these subjects. Finally, the Faculty adopted building extension plans in order to meet the needs of increasing numbers of medical students.

The separation of physiology, including histology and physiological chemistry, from anatomy and pathology provided the rationale for introducing practical laboratory classes in physiology and a separate course of lectures and demonstrations in pathology. Another major change orchestrated by the Faculty was a reorganisation of first year, with basic pre-medical sciences replacing liberal educational subjects such as Logic, Greek and Latin.

Further curriculum revisions were introduced in 1887. In a major change, students came into daily contact with sick patients at the Melbourne Hospital from second year onwards, instead of from later years of the medical course as was the case previously. This was a particularly controversial move, opposed by some members of the hospital and the university, as it required additional tutors and junior clinical teachers. With the creation of a clinical school at the Alfred Hospital in 1888, the opportunities expanded for students to become acquainted with practical aspects of patient care and treatment.

Changes in the teaching approach occurred in 1892 when the course of formal lectures in anatomy and pathology was nominally abolished and replaced by tutorial demonstrations in the Museum of Anatomy and Pathology. These tutorial demonstrations were integrated systematically with the prescribed textbook. At the same time, practical classes in bacteriology and pathological histology were introduced. The bacteriology course included training in sterilisation methods, examination of cultures of microorganisms and the separation of pathogens from surgical material. Meanwhile the pathological histology course trained students to stain, mount and examine selected specimens.

The curriculum was revised in 1900 when the course was divided into basic, pre-clinical and clinical divisions. When, in 1909 and 1910, a committee of the Faculty again looked at the curriculum, it endorsed the subdivision of the course into non-clinical and clinical parts and introduced a short transition period between the two.

Despite the financial depression of the late nineteenth century, the Victorian government provided ten thousand pounds in 1900 to expand facilities for the student body which had grown from less than a hundred in 1878 to 270 in 1897. These extensions maintained the single storey profile of the "New" medical building, to which a second storey was added in 1908.

When the medical course was lengthened from five to six years in 1926, the curriculum altered .

As the centenary of the medical school approached (in 1962), considerable expansion took place in tertiary education in Australia. Although Monash University's medical school had only just started taking students (in 1961), pressure mounted for the creation of a third medical school in Victoria. The dean of the Faculty, Professor Sydney Sunderland had the ear of the Premier, Sir Henry Bolte, and managed to convince him that the money would be better spent on a new medical building at the University of Melbourne and an expansion of staff numbers in the existingmedical course, rather than the creation of a new medical school. By the late 1960s, a new medical building complex was ltaking shape at the south-western corner of of the university.

Previous and Subsequent Entities

 1862 - 1876 Medical School Committee
       1876 - 1989 Faculty of Medicine
             1989 - 1991 Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry
                   1991 - Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences

Academic Departments

• Department of Anatomy, The University of Melbourne (1905 - 1923)
• Department of Anatomy and Pathology, The University of Melbourne (1882 - 1905)
• Department of Anatomy, Physiology and Pathology, The University of Melbourne (1862 - 1882)
• Department of Bacteriology, The University of Melbourne (1929 - 1965)

Affiliate

• Alfred Hospital Clinical School, University of Melbourne (1888 - 1964)

Deans

• Ryan, Graeme Bruce (1938 - )

  [1986 - 1989]

• Wright, Roy Douglas (1907 - 1990)

  [1950 - 1952]

Superior

• The University of Melbourne (1853 - )