The Chair in Physiology in Belfast was inexorably linked to the training of medical students.  The first professor was James Drummond who was appointed to a joint chair in Anatomy and Physiology (and later also Botany!) in 1819. Medical teaching in Belfast predated foundation of a formal medical school, so Drummond’s appointment was in a school, Belfast Academical Institution, which still operates today. Drummond then played a key role in founding the Medical School in 1835 and continued until retirement in 1849, when the school was integrated into the newly opened Queen’s College Belfast. Hugh Carlile was appointed Professor of Anatomy and Physiology in the new school and continued until 1860, when Peter Redfern took over. Like his predecessors, Redfern was more of an anatomist than physiologist. He produced most of his research output on cartilage in his previous post in Aberdeen. Apparently, when he came to Belfast his teaching duties, for which he was widely revered, took over. Throughout the middle of the 19^th century, Physiology gradually began to acquire its own identity, so, with the foundation of the Physiological Society in 1976, it was natural to split Redfern’s post when he retired in 1893. Hence, William Henry Thompson became the first Dunville Professor of Physiology, which takes its name from an endowment from the wealthy Dunville family of distillers in Belfast. Thompson was a man of great talent and wide research interests which included studying the effects of ‘Peptone’ when injected into the circulation, lesions of the temporal cortex, the effect atropine and morphine on urine output and the metabolism of arginine. In 1902, Thompson moved on to Trinity College Dublin and was replaced by Thomas Milroy.  Milroy was a quiet man, but a productive researcher, again in diverse areas. He and his brother John, who became Professor of Biochemistry, are commemorated by the Milroy Medal, awarded annually to the top Queen’s medical student in Physiology and Biochemistry. Henry Barcroft became the next Dunville Professor in 1935 and with him began a golden age for Physiology in Queen’s.  He studied human blood flow by venous occlusion plethysmography and this continued with David Greenfield, the next Dunville Professor, when Barcroft left for Thomas’s Hospital Medical School in 1948.  Under Greenfield, Physiology in Queen’s reached its zenith with many of his mentees going on to high profile posts across the world.  Examples include ‘Darty’ Glover (Dean of Medicine in Sydney), Bob Whelan (Vice-Chancellor of the University of Western Australia and, later, of the University of Liverpool) John Shepherd (chairman of the Board of Development at the Mayo Clinic) and Ian Roddie, who became the next Dunville Professor in 1964. Greenfield himself went on to found the medical school in the University of Nottingham. Under Ian Roddie’s stewardship, a field of research in lymphatic physiology developed in Queen’s, with two of his co-workers becoming, in turn, the most recent Dunville Professors, namely Noel McHale and Graham McGeown, both of whom also served their time on the Committee of the Physiological Society.