APPEARING IN THE PROVINCES almost as frequently as voluntary hospitals during these years were medical schools. Primarily, this was the result of a decision by the Royal College of Surgeons in 1826 to recognise courses offered by provincial medical instructors, as long as these individuals possessed the membership of the college and satisfied their teaching requirements. Just as private anatomy schools had flourished in eighteenth-century London to supplement the education of hospital surgeons’ apprentices, a number of enterprising practitioners commenced similar anatomical instruction in various provincial centres. The first to offer a course of anatomical instruction in Birmingham was the surgeon Thomas Tomlinson, whose lectures and other medical views were published in 1769as Medical Miscellany. Numerous others residing in the English provinces organised similar classes. For many it was a good way to fill the awkward gap between qualifying and securing an adequate medical practice. Classes always appear to have attracted about a dozen students and usually some local practitioners interested in the ways medicine had changed since qualifying. While some lecture series were short lived, others developed into proper schools offering more than a few practical lessons in anatomy. Outside Oxford and Cambridge, the first three provincial medical schools were founded in Manchester, Sheffield and Birmingham.

LEARNING TO HEAL: THE EARLY YEARS OF A PROVINCIAL MEDICAL SCHOOL

Like the orthopaedic and eye charities, medical instruction in Birmingham commenced on a small scale. The first school, in fact, was located in a house at 24 Temple Row, the building formerly occupied by the town's first dispensary, which had become the home and medical practice of Edward Townsend Cox and his son, William. Launched in 1825, instruction included primarily anatomy lectures and, more valuably, the dissection of human cadavers, access to which was certainly facilitated by the work that Edward Cox undertook as one of the surgeons to the workhouse infirmary. The appeal of these practical anatomy courses would continue well beyond the passage of the Anatomy Act in 1832, which was intended to increase the supply of cadavers for the purposes of medical education and put an end to the disreputable practice of body-snatching.