The origins of Imperial’s Faculty of Medicine

Training in medicine first emerged at Westminster in 1734 after Mr Henry Hoare and three friends declared that the Westminster Hospital (established 1719) should “provide poor sick people...with necessary food and physic during illness”.  George Guthrie, an ex-military surgeon, formally founded the school in 1834 with a new site established opposite the great Westminster Abbey. This opened at a cost of £40,000 and was the first subscription hospital created in London. Initial students were referred to as ‘cubs’ with three cubs assigned to each staff surgeon and numbers slowly increased over the following years. From 1854, the school continued to advance, adding a histology lab in 1874 and enlarging the chemistry labs in 1878. As expansion continued, a new building in Caxton Street was opened in 1885, financed by the hospital, the lecturers, the City of London and subscriptions.

Among the notable alumni, John Snow was one of the most outstanding, he attended the Westminster Medical school, 1837-1838. A pioneer in anaesthetics, and known as the founder of epidemiology, he made this name for himself through his actions in the Broad Street Pump Cholera outbreak of 1854, proving that impure water was to blame, not the miasma theory of airborne particles. His use of statistical mapping was innovative.  He influenced public health work and improved sanitation facilities in the mid-19th century.

During both World Wars, Westminster Hospital remained operational, but student numbers fell dangerously low. In 1914, the medical school was taken over by the army in order to train pathologists for the war effort. During the Blitz it survived several bomb attacks and played an important role as a casualty clearing station and a major accident unit.

The darkest days of the Blitz produced much camaraderie among the students and staff, and it was here where one of its most loved traditions began: the Shrove Tuesday Final Year Dinner. On Shrove Tuesday 1940, Chris Hildyard – the Hospital Chaplain – arranged a dinner to raise the spirits of trainees working there. He invited a guest of honour, Sir Stanley Woodwark whose witty speech was left written on the tablecloth as well as his drawn caricature. All present signed it, it was cut out and framed, and since then the Shrove Tuesday Final Year Dinner has been a feature of the hospital and school right up to the present time.

Westminster Hospital has had several different locations over its 275 years of operation, increasing its student body from 60 to 75 in 1966. As it expanded, the Westminster Medical School merged with local rivals Charing Cross Medical School and by 1992 it was proposed that London’s undergraduate medical schools should come within a college of the university, resulting in Charing Cross and Westminster Medical School becoming part of Imperial College London in August 1997.

As one of London’s most important medical and teaching institutions, Charing Cross Hospital Medical School was founded by Dr Benjamin Golding in October 1818. The idea for the medical school came after a meeting was held at Golding's home to discuss setting up a charitable institution to be known as the West London Infirmary, located near the Strand in Charing Cross. In 1823 the institution was established in Villiers Street with accommodation for twelve beds, and in 1827 became known as Charing Cross Hospital. Golding intended that the hospital would be used to train students on a formalised basis, offering tuition in every branch of medical study and “to supply the want of a university, so far as medical education is concerned”.

After a period of expansion in 1866 and a major rebuild in 1877 the hospital had doubled in size and in 1881 a separate medical school was created in Chandos Place. Once the decision to admit female medical students was taken during the First World War, Edith (later Baroness) Summerskill enrolled to the school and later became Labour M.P. for Fulham in 1938.

It was clear by the 1930s that Charing Cross Hospital needed larger premises, but it wasn’t until 1957 that the Ministry of Health proposed a link with Fulham and West London Hospitals, with a plan to rebuild on the site of the Fulham Hospital. The Charing Cross Hospital and its medical school moved from Covent Garden into the new buildings on the Fulham Palace Road in 1973.

On 9 June 1976 Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, as Chancellor of the University of London, opened the Reynolds Building - a new medical school building named after the Dean, Dr Seymour Reynolds. The new medical school then saw a greater intake of students, rising from 46 to 120. Charing Cross and Westminster Medical School became part of Imperial College London in August 1997 and Charing Cross Hospital celebrated its 200th birthday in 2018. To mark the occasion, the Imperial Health Charity created the Anniversary Garden as an outdoor space for patients with dementia and neurological conditions being cared for at the hospital.

St Mary’s Hospital opened in Paddington with one hundred and fifty beds on 13 June 1851, founded by Samuel Armstrong Lane, a surgeon who had completed his early studies at St Georges Hospital.  St Mary’s Hospital Medical School opened a few years later in 1854 and was officially recognised by the University of London in 1900, with the number of students rising to 40.

The distinguished history of St Mary’s Hospital Medical School has often been characterised by a great number of famous teachers, researchers and administrators. One notable and innovative Dean, 1920-1945, Lord Moran (Charles McMoran Wilson) was also Winston Churchill’s personal physician 1940-1965.

The school has a long tradition of contributing to music, arts and sport – particularly rugby and athletics. Among the notable alumni was Sir Roger Gilbert Bannister, a student at St Mary's from 1967 to 1973 who was the first ever athlete to run a mile in under four minutes in 1954. Bannister trained at the track at Paddington Recreation Ground in Maida Vale while training as a medical student. In March 2004, a lecture theatre at St Mary’s was named after Bannister and on display is the stopwatch that was used to time the race, stopped at 3’:59’’.

 Others who worked at St Mary’s included Sir Almroth Edward Wright who came to St. Mary's in 1912 as Director of the Inoculation Department and later the Wright Fleming Institute until 1946. An international pioneer of bacterial vaccines, he developed the “anti-typhoid fever” (Salmonella typhi) inoculation used to great effect in allied troops in WWI; his bacteriological work on the management of wounds was also recognised as correct and innovative. Sir Alexander Fleming, working in Wright’s lab, discovered penicillin in 1928 and was awarded the Nobel Prize for this discovery together with Howard Florey and Sir Ernst Chain (a biochemist and later Head of the Biochemistry Department at Imperial College) of the William Dunn School of Pathology Oxford, who developed penicillin from a laboratory observation to its transformative therapeutic use.

 Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother had a long association with St Mary’s and in 1931 laid the foundation stone of the new medical school on Norfolk Place; fifty-two years later she also laid the foundation stone of the new QEQM wing of St Mary’s hospital, named in her honour. In August 1988, St Marys Hospital Medical School became the fourth constituent college to merge with Imperial College London.