Joseph Erlanger (1874-1965): the cardiovascular investigator who won a Nobel Prize in neurophysiology.

Born in San Francisco in 1874 into the family of German immigrants in which he was the only one to proceed beyond elementary education, Joseph Erlanger graduated from the University of California (Berkeley) in 1894. He was about to enter the local Cooper Medical School when he was told that the new medical school in Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore) aimed to surpass all others, and there he graduated and was later coached for a career in academic life by William H Howell (1860-1945). In due course he held the Chairs of Physiology in the University of Wisconsin (Madison) and Washington University at St Louis, Missouri.

James Alexander Lindsay (1856-1931), and his clinical axioms and aphorisms.

John Alexander Lindsay was born at Fintona, county Tyrone in 1856, and at the age of 23 he graduated in medicine at the Royal University of Ireland. After two years in London and Europe he returned to Belfast to join the staff at the Royal Victoria Hospital and in 1899 he was appointed to the professorship of medicine. He was valued by the students for his clarity and by his colleagues for his many extracurricular contributions to the medical profession in the positions entrusted to him.

The frustration of Lady Aberdeen in her crusade against tuberculosis in Ireland.

When in his Annual Report for 1905 the Registrar General for Ireland pointed out to the lately arrived Lord Lieutenant, The Earl of Aberdeen, that annually in every 100 deaths in Ireland 16 were victims of tuberculosis, Lady Aberdeen took notice. In March 1907 she founded the WNHA with the clear duty of taking part in the fight against the appalling ravages of that disease, and organised a Tuberculosis Exhibition the following October. And so began a campaign that led to the building of Peamount Sanatorium in county Dublin, the Allan Ryan Hospital at Ringsend, and the Collier Dispensary in the city centre.

Archibald Billing (1791-1881) MD FRCP FRS: bedside teaching at the London Hospital (1822).

After graduation at Trinity College Dublin in 1814 Archibald Billing, who was born in County Dublin, settled in London. His Dublin MD (1818) was incorporated at Oxford and he taught at the London Hospital where, when appointed Senior Physician in 1822, he introduced teaching at the patients' bedsides. He ceased to lecture in 1836 when he was invited to become a member of the Senate of the University of London.

On first looking into auriculo-ventricular asynchrony.

Walter Gaskell's demonstration in 1882 that it was possible to block the passage of contraction from auricle to ventricle in the frog heart by means of a clamp spurred Joseph Erlanger (1906) to prevent, by similar means, impulse conduction through the bundle of (Wilhelm) His jun. (1893) in the mammalian heart. With a miniaturized polygraph to record the jugular and arterial pulsation, James Mackenzie (1902) displayed various grades of heart block in the human heart.

Brice Clarke (1895-1975) and the control of tuberculosis in Northern Ireland.

Among the problems facing Northern Ireland after its foundation in 1920, one of the most daunting was the prevalence of tuberculosis, a chronic communicable disease with highest mortality among young women and men in the prime of life. Over a quarter of a century, legislative changes tardily responded, and in spite of, or because of its magnitude, Brice Clarke (1895-1975) devoted himself to the challenge. After decorated service in the Great War of 1914-19 he returned to finish his medical studies in Queen's University Belfast and held hospital appointments until he became Chief Tuberculosis Officer for Belfast and soon afterwards Director of Tuberculosis Services in Northern Ireland.

Thomas Wrigley Grimshaw (1839-1900). Registrar general 1879-1900.

Thomas Wrigley Grimshaw was born in Whitehouse, County Antrim, in 1839, and learned his medicine at the Dublin School of Medicine when its reputation was at its highest. If his teachers strayed from the art of bedside medicine into science it was into meteorology that had been revived by Thomas Sydenham, the 'English Hippocrates' in the seventeenth century. When Grimshaw was appointed Registrar General for Ireland in 1879 he diverted attention from the acute epidemics of zymotic diseases to chronic pulmonary affections that numerically were far more deadly.

Intensive care 1650: the revival of Anne Greene (c. 1628-59).

On a cold December day in 1650, 22-year-old Anne Greene was hanged in Oxford. When taken down after half an hour, she was found to show signs of life and over the next few days William Petty (1623-87), Thomas Willis (1621-75), Ralph Bathurst (1620-74) and Henry Clerke (1622-87) ministered to her full recovery. She was later pardoned of the charge of infanticide and, with the coffin wherein she had lain as a trophy, went into the country, became the subject not only of a prose and poetic narrative but also of a woodcut.