Source: most information taken from an article written by BT Davis for Aesculapius (Magazine for Birmingham medical graduates published by the Sands Cox Society) called The Queen’s Hospital, and William Sands Cox, 1841 – 1940 with snippets from the article by an unknown author about how BAH came about and also from the 1941 BAH Board report. Date of article unknown but probably 1994 or 1995.

Timeline

• William Sands Cox (born 19^th May 1801) was the son of Edward Townsend Cox who was surgeon to the Birmingham Workhouse, Dispensary and Garrison Hospital in Birmingham.
• After attending King Edwards School, as had his father, he was apprenticed as a surgical pupil to his father subsequently moving to the Borough Hospital of St Thomas’s and Guys in London where he was apprenticed to Sir Astley Cooper (the most eminent surgeon of the day and a friend of Sands Cox’s father). The period in London was necessary in order to qualify for admission to the Royal College of Surgeons which he did in 1824 and the Society of Apothecaries which he did in 1823. While in London, Sands Cox (WSC) was shocked by the wild behaviour of the medical students and this may have inspired him to establish a Medical School in Birmingham where students could be better controlled by their masters and parents and encouraged towards more diligent study.
• WSC started his first course of surgical lectures in Birmingham on 1^st December 1825 at his father’s house, 24 Temple Row. 
• Following the addition of lecturers to complete the curriculum, his medical school was recognised in 1828. 
• The medical school moved to a custom-built home in Snow Hill in 1829, and then moved to larger premises in Paradise Street in 1834. In 1836, King William IV gave the school the title of Birmingham Royal School of Medicine and Surgery, a rare accolade shared around that time only with Manchester.
• WSCs greatest problem was providing clinical experience for his students. There was insufficient at the Workhouse and the General Hospital refused access because they had their own private paying pupils.
• On November 11^th 1839, WSC sent a carefully reasoned letter proposing a new hospital that would function as a hospital for teaching to the Rev JT Law, a trustee of the Medical School. His suggestion was well received, and the new hospital was approved on February 15^th 1840. 
• Money was collected and a donation of £200 was received from the Rev Samuel Warneford of Bouton on the Hill in the Cotswolds who later became a regular and generous benefactor to the School and Hospital. The donation stipulated a chaplain must be appointed and paid £40 p.a. Perhaps this is why BAH (Birmingham Accident Hospital) always had two chaplains from the day it opened its doors.
• The site chosen for the new hospital was described as the most elevated, open and salubrious westward of the town; a concept later remarked on by those planning the BAH. 
• The new hospital cost £935-15s. Its foundation stone was laid by Earl Howe on 18^th June 1840 and a glass vase containing coins and medals was embedded under the stone. The ceremony was preceded by a public breakfast attended by 450 people in the Town Hall. A Masonic procession led by the Mayor with music provided by the Royal Scots Grays proceeded from the Town Hall to Bath Row. More than 10,000 people watched the stone laying.
• Queen Victoria accepted the position of Patron of the Hospital and named it Queen’s Hospital, a privilege enjoyed by no other general hospital in the country.
• Building work proceeded rapidly although when the builders went bankrupt, WSC purchased the materials himself and for six months paid the workmen’s wages out of his own pocket.
• The building was completed free from debt on 18^th June 1841. It had two wings containing 130 beds although only 70 were equipped at first.
• It was the first hospital in the provinces to be built specifically for the teaching of students. Until the University of Birmingham was founded in 1903, students had to do part of their training in London in order to have their training recognised by the RCS and Society of Apothecaries and thus to be awarded their degrees.
• The dispensary and home visiting department began work almost immediately and the first patients were admitted on October 24^th 1841.
• A new detached block containing 28 beds for patients with infectious disease was built. Its foundation stone was laid on July 16^th 1845 by WSC’s father. 
• Benefactors were recorded on marble tablets which remained in place at BAH. They were a gift of £905 5s 6d derived from penny subscriptions from the artisans of Birmingham and given in 1847, £1070 13s 3d was raised by a concert given by Jenny Lind in the Town Hall in 1848, and a half share of the £5054 12s 4d raised from two fetes held at Aston Hall organised by manufacturers and tradesmen in 1856.
• In 1862, the outpatient room was enlarged, two new wards and a chapel were built. The £1600 cost was raised by WSC in penny postage stamps.
• In 1867, the house and grounds of St Martin’s Rectory next door were purchased in order to build a new out-patient department and nurses home. Mr Joseph Sampson Gamgee established the ‘Working Men’s Fund for the Extension of the Queen’s Hospital. They, with additional contributions from others including Queen Victoria, raised enough for the building work and the foundation stone for the outpatient department was laid on December 4^th 1871 by Lord Leigh. 1000 children sang a hymn written for the occasion by the Revd Charles Kingsley called ‘From thee all skill and science flow’. The Mayor of Birmingham’s Ambrose Biggs opened the new department on 7^th November 1873. 
• The Nurses Home was built in 1887 to accommodate 38 nurses and was enlarged in 1907. Also, in 1887, the two original wings were extended.
• Electric lighting was installed in 1889.
• More ground to the west of the hospital was purchased in 1904 and large medical block was opened on 23rd October 1908. A new chapel was also built.
• The last major development consisted of six surgical wards and three operating theatres was built between 1925 and 1927. The Birmingham Hospitals Council refused permission for a new radiology department or additional accommodation for doctors or nurses.
• After WW1 many voluntary hospitals were in difficulty financially. A government grant was given which was administered by the Voluntary Hospitals Committee. There was also a Birmingham Joint Hospital Committee which included representatives from local authority hospitals. These two committees amalgamated in 1925 to form the Birmingham Hospitals Council which was responsible for the co-ordination of appeals for money, the development of local hospitals in relation to one another, the collection of information about the needs of hospitals and their patients and facilitating co-operation between hospitals.
• In the 1920’s Dr Stanley Barnes, a neurologist at the General (later Dean to the Faculty of Medicine), devised a plan to build a new Medical School adjacent to the University in Edgbaston and he suggested that a large general hospital and specialist hospitals for dentistry, ophthalmology and obstetrics be built adjacent to the medical school to replace the ageing hospitals in the City Centre.
• Some but not all of his ideas happened, namely the building of the medical school and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. It was planned that the new QE would provide an increase of between 250 and 300 new beds and that although initially only 200 and 250 beds would open, further expansion to 400 beds would take place with a concomitant reduction of bed numbers at the Queen’s. The first beds at the QE opened in 1938, but due to ‘war conditions’, no reduction in the number of beds at the Queen’s hospital followed immediately. Even when the Queen’s became BAH, 21 Queen’s in patients remained.

Key Queens Medical Staff Who Worked With WSC

• Augustus Volnay Waller (1816 – 1870), physician and Professor of Physiology described degeneration of divided nerves, now known as Wallerian degeneration. 
• Balthazar Walter Foster (1840 – 1913), physician and Professor of medicine was responsible for direct representation of the medical profession by election to the GMC.
• Joseph Sampson Gamgee (1828 – 1886), surgeon introduced absorbent cotton wool as a dressing. Also invented the disposable sanitary towel and introduced plaster of Paris splinting of fractures to Great Britain. The Working Men’s Fund he founded to raise funds for the Queen’s evolved to become the Hospital Saturday Fund in 1973. Originally on one particular Saturday a year, men worked overtime and donated their earnings to the fund which were used to support voluntary hospitals where they were then entitled to treatment. By 1938, the working people of Birmingham made small regular contributions and £275000 was raised which was the main financial support of all Birmingham voluntary hospitals.
• Furneaux Jordan (1830 – 1911), surgeon devised an operation for amputation of the leg at the hip.
• Jordan Lloyd (1854 -1913), Professor of Surgery remembered as a great teacher and wrote about the surgical treatment of gunshot wounds to the abdomen and neck, about various fractures and the management of wounds to the arterial trunk (? aorta)
• John Hall Edwards (1858 -1926), inspired by the work of Roentgen, he built an x-ray machine and on 14th February 1896, he x-rayed the hand of a charwoman to locate the position of an embedded needle. DT Davis says that according to Dr JF Brailsford (first BAH radiologist) was the first recorded medical use of x-rays. He was also the first person to describe x-ray burns of human hands which he had himself and he later lost his fingers and died of malignant change.