Radcliffe Infirmary

This is one of the places I was going to photograph last Wednesday, when I was distracted by the giraffes.

The Radcliffe Infirmary, named after physician John Radcliffe, opened in 1770 and was Oxford's first hospital. It was finally closed in 2007.

Medicine has been taught at Oxford since the thirteenth century, and for several hundred years Oxford was in the forefront of medical education. Its influence reached a peak in the seventeenth century, when the turbulent political atmosphere of London drove many leading scientists to seek a haven in Oxford. William Harvey, who discovered the circulation of the blood, was among their number; others included Thomas Willis, a pioneering neuroanatomist and Christopher Wren, better known for his architectural achievements but who made a number of detailed anatomical drawings while at Oxford. In the eighteenth century, benefactions of an Oxford trained doctor, John Radcliffe, led to the foundation in 1770 of the Radcliffe Infirmary, one of the first public hospitals to be established outside London. Some years earlier, the Radcliffe Camera was built to house the first library in Oxford dedicated to science.

Sir Henry Acland, who was appointed Regius Professor of Medicine in 1857, launched a renaissance of teaching and research in medicine whose momentum continues to this day. He concentrated on providing a first-class scientific introduct on to medicine. Through his efforts, the University had established departments and professorships in anatomy, Comparative Anatomy and Physiology by the time he retired in 1895. An early holder of the Chair in Physiology was Sir Charles Sherrington, who won the Nobel Prize for his fundamental studies of the nervous system, and many of whose students also became leaders in their fields. At the same time, clinical teaching developed with the arrival of Sir William Osler from Johns Hopkins University to take up the Regius Chair in 1904.

Medical teaching and research advanced rapidly during the 1930s through the initiative of Sir Hugh Cairns, the leading British neurosurgeon of his day, and the generosity of Sir William Morris, later Lord Nuffield. He established the Nuffield Institute for Medical Research in the Radcliffe Observatory, and gave the then colossal sum of £2 million to establish five new chairs in Surgery, Anaesthetics, Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Orthopaedic Surgery and Clinical Medicine. Originally, the newly formed clinical school was planned as a postgraduate research development. However, following the evacuation of medical students from London to Oxford during the Second World War, a clinical school for the training of medical students was established at the Radcliffe Infirmary in the post-war period. It has grown steadily in size and its base moved to the John Radcliffe Hospital, which was established in Headington in 1979.


The Infirmary was acquired by the University of Oxford in 2003 and closed for medical use in 2007 with services being transferred to purpose-built buildings at the John Radcliffe and Churchill Hospitals in nearby Headington. The site has been earmarked to consolidate the senior administrative offices of the University of Oxford. It is being redeveloped by the University as the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, with planning permission approval in 2009.

The Woodstock Road entrance of the hospital was frequently seen in the ITV television series Inspector Morse.

After much bidding and persuasion, the University decided that the buildings could be used by its Humanities Division, whose members have recently moved in as the new lucky "patients". In advance of this new use, the University undertook an extensive cleaning and refurbishment programme, which is why these very fine buildings (Grade 2 listed) look so clean and bright in the scattered sunshine.

In 1758, the initial proposals to build a hospital in Oxford were put forward at a meeting of the Radcliffe Trustees, who were administering John Radcliffe's estate. £4000 was made available for the new hospital, which was constructed on land given by Thomas Rowney, one of the two Members of Parliament for Oxford.

The fountain in front of the main infirmary building was introduced in 1858 and is of the Greek god Triton.

A number of pioneering moments in medical history occurred at the hospital. Penicillin was first tested on patients on 27 January 1941. The first Utah Array (later known as the BrainGate) implantation in a human (Kevin Warwick) took place on 14 March 2002.

The site was also the former location of the Oxford Eye Hospital (which is now on the Headington campus). A plaque that we found today reveals that the first A & E facility in the country was opened at the Radcliffe infirmary in 1941.

Here is some further information about the history of the Oxford hospitals.