The flowering of London pride: finding a name for it.

Abstract

In the 1970s, university funding, which had risen progressively over the preceding years, began to plateau. The University of London was especially afflicted. There was a need to rationalize resources and the vice-chancellor of the day, Lord Annan (previously provost of University College London), saw opportunity and advantage in tackling medicine first. At the time the Faculty of Medicine comprised 12 so-called undergraduate medical schools, 13 exclusively postgraduate medical institutes, 5 dental schools, 2 schools of pharmacy and the school of veterinary medicine. Its excellence was not much in dispute. In the main, these schools were academically, geographically and financially separate from the University multifaculty institutions. London academic medicine attracted postgraduate students from around the world much in the way that Vienna had a century before. But its academic foundations were becoming less secure in that the schools were often divorced from mainstream sciences within the University at large. With financial imperatives in mind it was also apparent that maintenance of a large number of adjacent but administratively separate and small medical schools was especially expensive. Hidden agendas may have included ideas surfacing in two of the major multifaculty institutes, ultimately to break away from the federal University and take segments of academic medicine with them. It was also felt that, if London academic medicine could be rationalized, the process might serve as a model for dealing with other Faculties. At this time the Faculty of Medicine within the University was an active body, largely in the hands of clinical academics, determining academic standards and coming to involve individual medical schools somewhat more robustly. A working party was set up with Sir Brian Flowers (rector of Imperial College and subsequently Lord Flowers) as its chairman.