William Drennan (23 May 1754 – 5 February 1820) was an Irish physician and writer who moved the formation in Belfast and Dublin of the Society of United Irishmen. He was the author of the Society's original "test" which, in the cause of representative government, committed "Irishmen of every religious persuasion" to a "brotherhood of affection". Drennan had been active in the Irish Volunteer movement and achieved renown with addresses to the public as his "fellow slaves" and to the British Viceroy urging "full and final" Catholic emancipation. After the suppression of the 1798 Rebellion, he sought to advance democratic reform through his continued journalism and through education. With other United Irish veterans, Drennan founded the Belfast [later the Royal Belfast] Academical Institution. As a poet, he is remembered for his eve-of-rebellion When Erin First Rose (1795) with its reference to Ireland as the "Emerald Isle". Enlightenment education William Drennan (an Anglicization of the Irish clan name Ó Draighnáin) was born in the manse of First Presbyterian Church, Rosemary Street, Belfast, in 1754. He was the son of Reverend Thomas Drennan (1696-1762) and Anne Lennox (1718-1806). With his older sisters Martha (Martha McTier) and Nancy, he was one of only three of their eleven children who survived infancy. Like his father, Drennan studied at the University of Glasgow, a centre of the Scottish Enlightenment. Through his father's mentor, the Irish moral philosopher Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), a new generation of Scottish thinkers had drawn on the republican ethos of Presbyterian resistance to royal and episcopal imposition to defend what Drennan called "the restless power of reason". Consistent with a popularisation of Hutcheson by his friend in Edinburgh Dugald Stewart that linked individual conscience in matters of faith with the collective right to resist oppressive government, Drennan was later to cite John Locke's Treatises on Government as his "prime authority on politics". After graduating with an MA from Glasgow, Drennan studied medicine in Edinburgh under the experimental chemist Joseph Black and William Cullen "the most influential physician of his generation". He then returned to Belfast in 1778 and set up practice specialising in obstetrics. As a visiting physician to the Belfast Charitable Society poor house, in 1782 he proposed smallpox variolation, the practice, then widespread, of inoculating the skin of healthy people with smallpox to prevent a more serious case of the disease. (Sixteen years later Edward Jenner advertised the much safer