JUST AS LOCAL hospital administrators began to express a need for additional beds following the First World War, governors at Birmingham's medical school were equally concerned with clinical matters in those post-conflict years. Beginning with maternity beds, the medical faculty attempted to make up the most obvious deficiencies in clinical instruction during these years. Generally, this involved improving links between the medical school and the voluntary hospitals. However, in some cases, bed shortages encouraged medical educators, albeit reluctantly, to make better use of municipal hospitals.

By 1930, the medical specialties represented by local voluntary hospitals, from paediatrics to psychiatry, established a more clear presence in the medical school curriculum. Although usually associated with the nineteenth century, specialisation in medicine gained considerable impetus in the first decade of the twentieth century, a process aided by the First World War. As a consequence, the number of specialist medical institutions nationally nearly doubled between 1911 and 1921 alone. In subsequent years, consultants and specialists blended together and became virtually interchangeable, both terms having been defined by the possession of hospital posts and distinguishing them from general practitioners. At the same time, students appeared to be spending ever greater proportions of their time travelling between hospitals, as well as classrooms, with academic departments spread across two sites, one in the city centre, the other 2 miles distant in Bournbrook, Edgbaston. While both students and staff were spending many more hours in laboratories, which gradually transformed from side rooms into show rooms, members of the medical faculty travelled as much if not more, between sites, undertaking private practice, as well as their teaching and hospital duties. As a result, the problems facing medical educators in Birmingham only really began to be solved following a decision to consolidate medical and educational work at a single site in Edgbaston. Transforming part-time teaching appointments into fulltime academic posts was an even greater challenge and continued into the 1940s.

BEDS AND BODIES: IMPROVING CLINICAL INSTRUCTION

During the interwar period, the changing nature of medicine forced medical instructors to rethink clinical instruction and provide greater training in emerging specialties. Ironically, it was only in the years following the First World War, when the maternal mortality rate in England was in decline, that governors first addressed the shortage of maternity cases available to students.