DEMS
History
History of the Devon and Exeter Medical Society
The Devon and Exeter Medico-Chirurgical Society was formed in 1780, the second oldest in the country.
The earliest existing reference to the Medical Society seems to be a letter written by some of its members to Dr Thomas Glass on 4 July 1783. (Dr Glass (1709-1786) was one of the six physicians appointed when the original voluntary Hospital was founded by Alured Clarke (1696-1742), Dean of Exeter, in 1741.)
The Society
met in the old library at the Devon and Exeter Hospital in Southernhay. After the Duke and Duchess of York visited in 1899, the "Royal" prefix was added and the hospital became the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital. The original building is now known as Dean Clarke House after its founder. Clinical meetings were held in the old library before the Postgraduate Medical Centre was built and occupied in 1974, close to the time when the first new hospital was built on the Wonford site, later demolished because of concrete cancer and rebuilt finally as the present Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital (Wonford).
In the early days the Medical Society provided an opportunity for medical practitioners to meet. Those were the days when other medical meetings were few and certainly very different from today’s Postgraduate Medical Education sessions. Clinical meetings consisted largely of the presentation of cases; the medical journals of the 1800s record some of the cases and meetings. Notices of the Society’s meetings appeared in The Lancet, founded by Thomas Wakley (1795-1862) from East Devon. Wakley was born in Membury and schooled in Chard and at Taunton Grammar School, and was apprenticed to an apothecary in Taunton, and then on to St Thomas's Hospital in London.
Many details of the Society before the Second World War unfortunately have been lost, presumably destroyed in the Blitz that took such a toll in Exeter in May 1942. However, an old leather briefcase has survived and contained Minute Books and account books dating from just before the Great War of 1914-18. It was the custom that new medical staff would introduce themselves at the meetings and then be welcomed to the Society. More information since 1945 has been preserved and the Society goes from strength to strength, providing a forum for meetings and discussion separate from other streams of information and management.
Membership is drawn from a wide circle of doctors and others, working across the whole field of medicine and including general practitioners, hospital doctors, public health and other workers, who contribute to medicine in Exeter and the Society's aims. Meetings are held approximately each month when an invited speaker delivers a lecture on a topic of local or national, general or medical, interest. A subscription supper usually follows. Most meetings are held in the RILD (Research, Innovation, Learning and Development) Building which opened in 2014 (at a cost of more than twenty-seven million pounds) at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital.
The Society, a charity, also owns a fine collection of instruments and other artefacts, including some books, and is always grateful for donations. Items that might be discarded today will, in due course, become important pointers to the past. Items include surgical instruments and medical equipment, Xrays, anaesthetic equipment, drugs and apothecary ephemera, portraits, splints and much, much more. It has always been a hope that the whole collection could be displayed and one day, perhaps soon, that may become possible.
CGT
27 July 2016
