Writing in his memoirs in 1939, Thomas Garry, an Irish-trained doctor commented: 'The life of a medical student in Dublin in the eighties of the last century was very different from that of to-day. It was more hilarious, probably more picturesque and certainly more squalid' (Garry, 1939) The experiences of medical students, like Garry, have received surprisingly little attention from medical historians. In his important comparative study of medical education in Britain, France, the United States and Germany, Thomas Neville Bonner asserted that ‘the lives and experiences of students in general and their impact on medical education have been too little studied’. (Bonner, 1995) Similarly, more recently, Keir Waddington has commented that ‘in the historiography of medical education, students are largely absent or silent consumers. (Waddington, 2002). This paper will examine an important aspect of Irish medical student experience: the involvement of students in medical student societies. The first of these societies, the Medico-Chirurgical Society was established at Trinity College Dublin in 1867, with other societies being established at Irish medical schools from the 1870s onwards, such as the Belfast Medical Students Association, the Queen’s College Cork Medical Students Association, the Queen’s College Galway Medical Society, the ‘Bio Soc’ of the Royal College of Surgeons and the Irish Medical Students Association, a national body of medical students which was founded in 1944. In common with the medical societies attended by doctors, these student societies held regular meetings where members presented papers on medical and scientific subjects, in addition to discussing concerns relevant to the medical profession. Moreover, these societies had a social function, with committee members responsible for organising student debates, dinners and dances. Drawing on the minute books of these organisations and contemporary student magazines, this paper will investigate the role of these societies in the lives of medical students at Irish universities in the period. In particular, it will show how these societies not only allowed students the opportunity to further develop their knowledge of medicine and the issues relating to the medical profession but also provided a voice for students, allowing them to air concerns about the quality of teaching they were receiving. Furthermore, these societies, which were regulated to a certain extent by the staff of the medical schools, helped to embody students with a sense of professional unity.