IN 1900, the small provincial medical school originally run out of the Cox family private practice in Temple Row became the medical faculty of the new University of Birmingham. Despite affiliation with what was the first university campus in England, the new faculty, many of whom donned their new professorial titles, continued to occupy its old rooms at Mason College, only a short distance from its original premises in the centre of the city. While new buildings and modern facilities were being constructed for many of the university's scientific departments on 25 acres of land donated by Lord Calthorpe – ‘on the Bournebrook side of the Edgbaston estate’ – the medical school's links with voluntary hospitals firmly rooted the faculty in its city-centre site. Unlike the science faculty, which moved 3 miles west of Chamberlain Square into its grand new buildings, medicine, like the majority of the city's voluntary hospitals, continued to occupy a visible place in the life of Birmingham's inhabitants. Symbolically, the school's location also emphasised the tensions that existed ‘between those who upheld a vocational system of training and those who advocated a more academic, science-based medical curriculum as part of a university education’. For the moment, the school's distance from the university continued to favour the former camp.

At the first recorded meeting of the university's medical faculty on 28 June 1900, the principal and newly promoted professors – those of Anatomy, Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Midwifery, Gynaecology, Therapeutics, Forensic Medicine, Hygiene, Pathology, Lunacy, Operative Surgery and Ophthalmology – discussed only two issues: the colour of the academic gowns to be worn at degree congregations, exams and lectures, and the admission of women to the medical faculty. In regards to the first subject, the faculty preferred an all black gown with cardinal watered silk. Despite staff debating the issue at some length, students began to disregard the rule of wearing gowns to exams and lectures as early as 1912. In general, it was unsuitable for a modern university, such as Birmingham, ‘to impose the sight of such an anachronism as academic dress on the streets’. Unable to shed its industrial ethos, the city's university was destined to be set in its leafy suburbs.