The Edinburgh Chair of Midwifery was established in 1726, and was indisputably the first Chair of its kind in the British Islands, and probably in the world. It was in that year that the Town Council first established the medical faculty, by appointing two Professors of the Theory and Practice of Medicine and two of Medicine and Chemistry. A Chair of Anatomy had been instituted six years earlier through the instrumentality of the first Monro who became its first occupant. These five chairs were considered sufficient wherewith to teach all the medical knowledge of the day, and although appointed _ad vitam aut culpam_ the professors received no remuneration out of the city revenues. The Chair was not reckoned at first as a faculty Chair, but was termed a city professorship. The newly created medical faculty would have no midwifery within the precincts of the University; and this is scarcely surprising when we remember that at first the only persons lectured to by the city professor were women of an inferior class in whose hands the practice of the art almost entirely lay. Along with this appointment the Town Council established a system of regulation for midwifery practice within the city. It ordered that all midwives already in practice should at once be registered, and that no persons should thereafter enter on the practice within the city until they had presented to the magistrate a certificate under the hands of at least one doctor and one surgeon who were at the same time members of the College of Physicians or of the Incorporation of Chirurgeons, bearing that they had so much of the knowledge and principles of this art as warranted their entering on the practice of it; whereupon a licence should be given them signed by four magistrates at least entitling them to practise. It was further enacted that certain pains and penalties were to be inflicted upon ignorant persons for practising without this licence whereby their "want of skill might be of such dangerous consequences to the lives of so many people." It is to be presumed that as qualified medical men granted them these certificates and that these women had extensive practices, they possessed also a fair amount of skill. But slowly and gradually they had to give way and retire to the rank of nurses before the rise and growing public tolerance of the qualified male practitioner of obstetrics. The second occupant of the chair, appointed in 1739, was elevated to a place in the medical faculty, but Professor Thomas Young, who occupied it in 1756, was the first to teach the subject to medical students by means of lectures and clinical instruction. As already noted, it was left for James Hamilton to obtain the recognition of midwifery as a subject, a knowledge of which was necessary for the obtaining of the University medical degree.