Message from the Dean
Professor Mark Kearney, Dean of the School of Medicine
It’s a real privilege for me to be writing this first article for Medicine Matters as Dean of our medical school.
As a Leeds graduate, our medical school and the city of Leeds are very special to me. I arrived in Leeds in October 1984, a fresh faced young medical student armed with Grays Anatomy, a skeleton and huge optimism.
The youth, anatomy textbook and skeleton may have gone but the optimism remains and while we are currently in a period of political turmoil I am confident that our medical school will continue to build on an almost two century long history of training brilliant doctors and making discoveries that have changed the world we live in.
I qualified in 1989 and took up my first house officer post at St James’s Hospital in the Beckett Wing where I worked for Drs Walker and Simmons.
In those days medicine was very different to today; a patient with a heart attack would stay in bed for two weeks and if they developed heart failure their life expectancy was less than a year; rheumatoid arthritis was hugely disabling; and multiple myeloma was almost a death sentence.
Now 30 (ish) years later, work from our medical school has transformed the outcome of these and many other diseases, and I must admit I still get excited when I meet some of the brilliant individuals whose work contributed to these changes in human health.
However, as the world we live in changes at pace, our medical school also needs to adapt and we are currently embarking on an ambitious programme to develop and deliver a new school education and research strategy.
Engaging with all of our staff this project called Medicine Redefined will build on our proud history of improving people’s lives through our teaching and research.
In a world of uncertainty what remains certain, is that our medical school is a constant source of pride for all of us and I am committed to working with you and all of our staff to keep our school at the forefront of medical education and research that changes peoples lives.
