John Stearne, Founder and First President of the College of Physicians, Born

John Stearne or Sterne (1624–1669) was an Irish academic, and first president of the College of Physicians in Dublin.

John was born on November 25, 1624 at Ardbraccan, the episcopal palace of his grand-uncle, James Ussher, at that point bishop of Meath.

His father John Stearne of Cambridge, who settled in County Down and married Mabel Bermingham, a niece of Ussher, was a remote relation of Archbishop Richard Sterne.

Stearne is best known as the founder of the Irish College of Physicians. In 1660, he proposed to the university that Trinity Hall, situated in Back Lane, Dublin, then affiliated to the university, of which he had been constituted president in 1654, should be a college of physicians. The arrangement was sanctioned, and Stearne, on the nomination of the provost and senior fellows of Trinity College, in whom the appointment was vested, became its first president. No students were to be admitted who did not belong to Trinity College.

Stearne played a pivotal role in the establishment of the College of Physicians in Dublin, which was chartered in 1667. The college was founded to regulate the practice of medicine and elevate medical education standards in Ireland.

Death

Stearne died in Dublin on 18 November 1669 in his 44th year. He was buried, by his own request, in the chapel of Trinity College, where his epitaph, by his friend Henry Dodwell the elder, described him as Philosophus, Medicus, summusque Theologus idem.