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Aquilla Smith, physician and numismatologist, and T. P. C. Kirkpatrick, venereologist and bibliophile, wrote brief histories of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland in the 19th and 20th centuries, respec- tively; but lack of any full-scale account of its foundation and development caused the Fellows and President to sponser such a work in 1954. They entrusted the task to Dr. J. D. H. Widdess, Professor of Biology at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, whose scholarship had already been attested by the publication of An Account of the Schools of Surgery.
The author has not allowed his terms of reference to confine him narrowly but interprets them to permit him to set the history of the College against the broad background of medicine in Dublin and in Ireland. The influence of the physicians has been salutary, and if it must be conceded that now and then a spirit