Between the construction of the General Hospital and the 1840s, a number of other hospitals had been established, many first appearing as dispensaries and then transforming into hospitals with an improvement in funding and the introduction of beds for inpatients.

These new institutions included, in order of foundation:

• the Orthopaedic Hospital (1817)
• an eye hospital (1823)
• the Queen’s Hospital (1841)
• a lying-in hospital (1843)
• an ear hospital (1844)

A medical school had also been founded in 1825 by a young local surgeon, William Sands Cox, the Queen’s Hospital having been opened specifically as its associated teaching hospital.

Over the next half-century, many other voluntary hospitals opened. These represented a greater degree and acceptance of specialisation in medicine.

While most practitioners at this time would have described themselves as generalists, and specialisation implied partial knowledge and was often regarded as quackery, it was soon recognised that each specialist hospital offered staff and students considerable knowledge of particular cases in a relatively short period of time when compared to private practice.

This second wave of specialist hospitals in Birmingham included:

• a dental Hospital (1858)
• the Children’s Hospital (1862)
• the Women’s Hospital (1871)
• a skin hospital (1881)

In the last decade of the 19th century, work on a new and greatly enlarged General Hospital also commenced. The hospital was opened in 1897 and treated nearly 5,000 inpatients and ten times as many outpatients each year.

Like the General Hospital, a number of these smaller, specialist hospitals were soon recognised as teaching hospitals and became associated with the School of Medicine.

Three years later, these institutions and the medical school united as part of the University of Birmingham, its new (and present) campus being situated in Edgbaston, a green and leafy suburb to the west of the grey and overcrowded city centre. However, the Medical School and its affiliated teaching hospitals were still located some two miles distant in the centre of Birmingham.