Professor Colin Normand (1928–2011) Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, 1990–1993 Appointed in 1970, Colin Normand was the medical school’s first Professor of Child Health. He won a scholarship to study physiology at the University of Oxford and qualified at St Mary’s Hospital in 1952, working at University College Hospital before joining the team at Southampton. There he built a well-respected, stimulating and harmonious paediatrics department. He was heavily involved in designing the new curriculum, particularly as part of the team developing the fourth-year study in depth, and he promoted the use of regional centres for clinical teaching in paediatrics. Over the years he became active in many aspects of university administration and his facilitatory style meant his skills as a chairman were sought after. Normand also made a substantial contribution to respiratory physiology research. During a year’s fellowship at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore he worked on lung surfactant, an area of research he continued at Southampton.
Celebrating 25 years In 1996 the medical school celebrated its 25th anniversary. It hosted a series of events including keynote lectures by eminent figures from public life, health and science, such as Baroness Jay, Anthony Clare and Lewis Wolpert. Students and alumni enjoyed an anniversary ball and even a staff and student bed race. In the same year another eminent speaker came to Southampton. The Fourth Year Day, during which students presented their research projects to their peers and academics, had become an annual tradition, and it had become customary for the students to invite an external speaker to give a lunchtime address. In their choice of invitee that year, the school’s students showed they were just as capable of ambitious thinking as the academics. Eric Thomas recalls: “The students wrote to James Watson, Nobel Laureate and discoverer of the molecular structure of DNA, and he wrote back to say yes, he happened to be in the UK and would come along. Suddenly they had the most famous scientist on the planet coming to campus! It demonstrates the type of students that we were attracting because of the nature of our course.”
School or faculty? Originally known as the Faculty of Medicine, in 1995 a University restructure saw the medical school become the School of Medicine, part of an integrated Faculty of Medicine, Health and Biological Sciences (known from 2003/04 as the Faculty of Medicine, Health and Life Sciences). In 2010 it became the Faculty of Medicine once again, when the University reverted to a flatter organisational structure.
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