CAT among the kiwis.

I suppose the beginnings were recognisable in medicine and medical education as long ago as 1875, when a poor frustrated Coughtrey, appointed the first professor of anatomy and physiology and trying to establish a medical school in the University of Otago, was battling with the university council. In the despair of his non-progress, in a relationship that was always fragile, he wrote that if the establishment of a medical school in Dunedin were not prosecuted with expedition then Canterbury would forestall Otago. At about the same time the dissolution of the Provincial Government in New Zealand yielded to the formation of the Central Colonial Government. Of the many political permutations and gyrations that the provincialists in Otago examined to try to preserve its affluence for themselves, desperation allowed the proposal of an alliance with the province of Canterbury. This was archly rebuffed by the latter, provincial governments were abolished, and New Zealand became one nation. Although so in government, it has not been so in spirit, and the divisive parochialism, engendered of fierce local pride that persists, was recognised by the minister when he reflected that his decisions of February would "not please parochial areas." Nowhere are the manifestations stronger than between Otago (often allied with Southland, for they are of common stock) and Canterbury, immediately to their north in the South Island. Just how much these rivalries stem from the sectarian origins of English Anglican Christchurch and Scottish Presbyterian Dunedin, where Anglicans used to be overtly referred to as "the little enemy" in the community, is difficult to say-probably no greater than Plaid Cymru and the Scottish Nationalist Party influences in Britain today, I suppose. The fierce calvinistic hold of Presbyterians on Dunedin began to break when gold was found in avaricious quantities in the early 1860s, attracting a diluting influx of fortune seekers. In that decade the city's population multiplied sixfold, Dunedin became the business hub of New Zealand, and into this affluent town and busy port the medical school was born in 1875. Like others before it, however, the gold boom was short lived, rich as it may have been. Indeed, the 1880s saw a severe economic depression in New Zealand. The twentieth century ushered in the quietening of the south. The centre of population moved, and today the city of Christchurch on the Canterbury plain has twice the population of Dunedin. For specialist services the Canterbury hospital authority drains a population over half