Joe, this is talking on the 18th of November 2003, talking about your cell phone interactions with the Oxford Medical School.
What really made you come to Oxford in the first place? Well, I had always wanted to work at a teaching hospital and live in the country.
And Oxford and Cambridge were the only two places where you could do that in those days.
And there was an excellent man in Cambridge doing urology.
And I was about to go off to the States for my year doing the PTA.
And so I went to see the secretary of the hospital, Jumba,
and I said I would be very grateful if he would let me know because the job wasn't decided a year before I was appointed and
author Elliot Smith was about to retire and he did the paediatrics and the urology and they decided to split the job in two acts,
making both general surgery, both general surgeons, one with an interest in urology and one with an interest in paediatrics.
And I got the urological one and Malcolm Golf got the paediatric one.
And it's quite important that, you know,
that the British Association of Urological Surgeons had been around the country
aiming to adopt pure urology and therefore on my appointments committee,
as it wasn't a purely urological job, they refused to appoint an outside assessor and they had gone around the
centres in the country where they thought there ought to be urology to people.
Mr Howard Handly and Professor Lesley Pyra had gone around talking to people about
the need for pure urology and clearly upsetting my general surgical colleagues,
particularly Ted Maloney. And so they wouldn't appoint an outside success assessor for this job.
And so a chap called Sarah Richards, who has no idea he was by the outside assessor and he,
incidentally, was a general surgeon to the end of his life,
I think, because if you were a senior surgeon at the Middlesex in those days,
you automatically got a knighthood, whereas the lesser specialities didn't.
And so anyway, it that caused me a bit of trouble settling down feathers, ruffled feathers.
When I arrived here, I had spent the last year in the USA.
I was working as a foreign fellow at UCLA.
Right. And Jamberoo was as good as his word.
And he let me know and sent me the advert for the job.
And so I was able to apply actually from Los Angeles.
And I came back from Los Angeles in February and the job interview was in March, tried to start in April.
Now the. Uh.
After the job interview on the job interview was in March, and so I was home in time, so I didn't need to fly back from America for the interview.
And I can remember coming over and we were living in London at the time.
I'd got a temporary job at U.S. age where I qualified initially.
And then and we were living in London.
And I drove over with Mafalda to the Markus's house in time.
And RIMPAC were very old friends of ours from age, from UCLA of that actually qualified.
But but I known Andrew and indeed he'd looked after me when I had TB and he was in charge of the TB annexe.
And so we were very friendly and we kept in touch with them.
And Mafalda, when we stayed with the Marcos's team, went into the local church and prayed for me to get the job.
I mean, I did. And and then I started at the beginning of July.
I think he was on the 7th because there had been difficulties with my two senior colleagues and Tim Cahill and Ted Malone
because they'd been appointed on the same day and there was continual bickering about who should be senior surgeon,
although everybody recognised Tim Taylor, who was a much nicer man as a really sensible chap, and he was generally regarded as a senior surgeon.
But in order to stop this, because Malcolm Gough was over the not older than I was and they made us start a week apart.
So anyway, no, no question about it.
Fighting over seniority because being Savir surgery was quite an important thing in those days.
Hmm. So this is back in 66 says and I started on the 7th of July, 1966.
And I that was the one way I thought I could establish urology as a distinct speciality was by doing no general surgery and in private practise.
Right. I didn't do any private practise for the first couple of years because.
I didn't think that was a very good idea, but when we were appointed, I got, uh.
I got two sessions with the university.
Yes, now there were two surgeons and three physicians,
you were one appointed at the same time and the three physicians all got 500 pounds for expenses.
I don't know if you remember that. No, I'd forgotten my health.
And but George Pickering, who dished out the money, didn't think surgeons knew anything about research.
And so we got nothing. Indeed, when we started in private practise, which was largely at Backlund,
we had Malcolm and I had to buy our own instruments, yosh because those instruments were there.
But the general surgeons wouldn't have what with the.
Of course, I think it was about 600 pounds.
Well, it's a lot of money and a lot of money. Yes. And it's quite a lot of money.
And anyway, I thought I would just politely decline general surgical referrals as they seemed to me the way to slowly build up urological practise.
And indeed the general practitioners around were absolutely marvellous.
They were particularly download record, Richard.
Yes. And Headington, he was in Headington and he recognised that the urology really wasn't up to scratch.
And so I used to get a lot of referrals from him, from David Birch, who was in practise in Islip, and from Deqi, who was in practise in Bedford.
Yes. And and I could remember James Barrett, who said to me this trying to read from this section is prostate.
Prostate is no good. And so I said, well, that's not my experience.
And every time I he sent me a patient and I did it to you are on the patient.
I sent him back to him with a little thing. He's dry exclamation.
And I think of the early years because I was the junior surgeon very definitely, and there were six surgeons at the time,
Tim Tebow, Ted Maloney, David Tibs, Charles Webster and then Malcolm and myself.
Yes. And the professoriate team.
And yes, there was the professorial team and where the reader was, Milo Canes and Alf Gunning was attached to the surgical unit.
And he is a great man.
And he would tackle and he would I can remember one thing.
The one thing I would not tackle was a ruptured optic aneurysm because I hadn't done it during my training.
And so one time my houseman rang up when we were on duty and said, oh, there's a patient and we've got it ruptured aortic aneurysm.
I said, oh, give Mr. Canning a ring.
Says, This isn't something I've done. And I rang back later and I said, what's happened to that patient?
And the chap said, Well, I'm getting theatre ready at one o'clock in the morning or something like that.
I said, What did Mr. Gunnin think about him? Well, we haven't seen him.
Oh, good. And then.
And then but I I managed to establish urology as a separate subject,
partly because I was inundated in the outpatients and partly because I never actually mentioned this to Ted.
But any neurological cases that came in on our take, I used to keep under my care.
I had one operating list a week at the Radcliffe on the Wednesday and two operating lists at the Churchill, one on a Monday, one on a Friday.
And it's interesting that David Tibs, who is the most polite and gentleman, if you meet him, is almost like a fiend in Carnot in the theatre.
All right. And he used to share it was the next door theatre and there were terrible noises coming from.
So did you have a ward of the general bedroom? I had beds at the Churchill and they were shared by Charles Webb, Webster, Malcolm Golf and myself.
And we used purely logical end up there.
Probably I. Oh, no, no, no.
I don't think I did because I,
I had to accept I didn't turn away general surgery from the outpatients because I regarded myself as a trained general surgeon,
which is I've had rather unusual training, but it was perfectly adequate by the standards of the day.
And then so I used to do the lists and that's a there's Radcliffe Mondays and Fridays at the Churchill.
And Saturday morning I had to do my outpatients because there wasn't an outpatient slot free for Elliott Smith.
Malcolm took over and said the only thing left was on Saturday morning.
I was that sort of thing. When you start off in a place I spent and but I think Mafalda got a bit fed up because I had
to go and do an enormous outpatient clinic and then I would have to go around the world,
the Radclyffe and the Churchill. And I never got home until teatime on Saturday.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. So it was it was quite tough guy. Different from now.
Oh yes. And. Yes, sorry.
All right. You were saying being a junior surgeon was a bit difficult.
Well, you just got the worst slot in the operation last week, and that was it was all right.
And I enjoyed doing our patients. I've enjoyed all my working life.
And so then gradually, the urology being built up and general practitioners who had a wide variety of general surgeons to send their patients do,
they gradually stopped sending urology.
To me, it was a gradual process and it took several years.
Charles Webster was very good at referring urology to me, as well as Tim Tebow and the other and David Tips as well.
The others less so. But, uh, then we, uh, gradually built up urology and I started doing some research.
I had to because I was doing some private practise and, uh, and the money went into a university fund.
And gradually as this built up, I as I started employing a research chap and he did some, uh,
he did some work on rats, kidneys, and, uh, I don't think it never amounted to very much.
But he got an M.S. out of his nose.
He was medically qualified. Oh, yes. Yeah. Paul Hammond, his name.
I remember him. Yes.
When you came to Oxford, you know, after you've been there a few months, what did you think of the standard compared with World America and usage?
Well, I wasn't very proud of you, S.H. Urology.
And I think they had had the practise, I think, almost uniquely, in the London teaching hospitals of not having specialists.
And my urological mentor, Uncage, was a man called Deeyah Davis, and he was a great expert in parathyroid.
So. Right. Because he worked with Charles Dowd.
Yeah, but I got involved at New S.H. with the with the unit that were looking after children with the psycho urinary reflux.
And the leading light in that was gene smell, etc.
And, uh, but Max Rosenheim was in overall charge and I had been doing my thesis before
I went to America in the X-ray department with a chap called David Edwards.
In those days, it was thought quite dangerous to catheterise patients.
Paul Basan wrote a great letter, an article on the case against the catheter,
and it was thought that you couldn't possibly take taken a normal person or even a child with urinary infection and catheterise them.
And so the only opportunity that we did,
I had to measure the pressures and flows in the in the bladder was during the make treating
Sister Gramp's sessions that David Edwards used to run weekly in the X-ray department.
Uh, and I think that if I have made one really good contribution, uh, it is to.
Show that small girls did not have obstruction of the urethra.
It was easier to show that they were not obstructed than that they were obstructed.
Right, because nobody knew about pressures and flows.
Although I had a Swedish friend called both of the girls and he had done some splendid work in the 50s and measuring pressures and flows.
And he came over to England.
He spoke beautiful English. And he'd been living with an uncle in England during the war, I think.
And he gave me all his work.
And, uh, and I can remember one time he came over and he was out at our home in North London having dinner,
and he said he'd been up the Thames that day and he'd seen a notice which said, Hennelly Pescatore.
So tell me, Joe, is this an angling club for urologists? Splendid.
But does that observation of yours make Jean Smellers story less likely?
No, because the the thing is that people thought and those days, even people like David A.
Williams thought that there was an obstruction because of the appearance of the urethra during a McTear rating system,
which was called a spinning top areif. Retrade went in by the neck and then down at the bottom.
And so people thought in those days that obstruction equals infection.
Hmm. And that and David Williams had even published a paper on this, and they didn't come from the high ground on that.
And so I then I by sharing that there was no obstruction.
And I think this appearance, the spinning top urethra was actually caused because you couldn't I mean,
it's very difficult to get little girls to pee in the company of the company.
And so David Edwards, my colleague in the X-ray department, he had a thing called the Ed Wood sign,
which meant that you had to fill the bladder up until the little girl's toes turned back and then they would produce it.
And it was simply a question of that.
They were bladder was over overfull and it wasn't representing the natural situation at all, but it produced the spinning top urethra.
Now, that was being attacked, the spinning top urethra, which was thought to be obstructed, it was, uh, it was attacked on both ends.
Some people thought it was an obstruction, the neck of the urethra and other people thought it was the land of the free throw.
And the various people in this country were doing a plastic operation on the neck of the bladder.
And then other people were doing widening out the urethra.
And when I went to the States, they will naturally assume that infection meant obstruction.
And a lot of these quite a few of these girls and I saw some of this when I was working at UCLA were permanently incontinent and incontinent,
by the way, I can imagine about that. But then I can remember the early years if somebody annatto had retention.
It was super pubic the time, wasn't it? Well, it had been no.
I thought the catheter was very much better way of doing it.
And I invented it superbly well. It wasn't much good, but by the standards of the babies, it was reasonable and.
I used to work with a company who made medical instruments.
They were called Squibb, right. And they worked at High Wycombe.
Right. And they had a big department there.
And I used and they said to me, look, what should we be doing?
I said, you ought to be teaching your sales representatives about basic urology.
So I used to go and give lectures. And I mean, I was defending the sorry Jeff Veining Fenning Fenning.
We know. Fine, fine. And what about the nursing care at at Oxford.
Well, the nursing care was splendid, traditional nursing care and I suspect rather better than you get now because I've been brought up,
as you would be, by a generation of sisters who lost their fiances in World War One.
And they lived on the wards and they they guarded them with a fierce determination.
And I remember there was a girl called Mary Wellington,
who was always known as Mary Marlborough because she looked after Marlborough Ward and she was a
splendid lady and fiercely protective of patients and wouldn't let you get away with anything.
And what about the medical students? Well, the medical students in Oxford have always been very bright, and they were bright then.
And I realised that they were much brighter than me and and that I could usually keep ahead of them because I got a bit of experience under my belt.
But there were they were amazingly bad and have always been a delight to teachers.
You didn't think there were too many of them towards the end, because in the beginning there were so few.
So few is No. One in 66. We we I remember we used to invite the students from your farm firm for three months,
and I always used to have them out to the house at the end of their time and give them a good good.
And the operating theatres, what were they like? Well, do you remember a lady called Eileen Hurley or Trent?
Yes, I did. And she was the sister in charge of the Radcliffe theatres,
and she used to have a little office just opposite the theatres that because
of the changing rooms and the theatres on either sides of the main rattly.
Well, anyway, and trends I got on very well with and she was called Trex because she couldn't she was Irish and couldn't say thread's by
name and but she used to sit in her little office opposite the theatres and nobody she knew everybody going up and down.
The thing I can remember going in one night that the rent, the main card, all the radclyffe was in the square squares, a black and white.
And I can remember coming in in the middle of one night and one of the cleaners
was had a machine and he was cleaning all the white bits and ignoring the black.
So. So then when did the new theatres get built, the ones that were across the theatre?
Yes, they were built because Tyler was the chairman of the board when I was appointed.
He wasn't actually on my appointments committee, although he claimed later he had been.
That was a rather nice solicitor who was the deputy chairman of the court.
Remember his name and.
I forgot where we started off with one word about the new theatres, the way they came in in the early 70s and what they needed, as it were.
Oh yeah. Well, they were a huge improvement on the old ones.
And but you see, I always had quite good theatres at the Churchill because they were made as part of the
American hospital originally and they were light and airy and had beautiful floors.
And it was that other chap I think I ought to mention is Frank Ellis, because Frank Ellis was a huge enthusiast.
Yes. And he, uh, he was one of the first people I met, apart from the interview, because he invited me out to dinner at the RSM.
And when I was still living and working in London and I used to play squash with him and he was he was then in his 70s,
I don't know, six days, six days. But because he lived to over one room and he I used to play squash with him and it was
quite embarrassing for me as a young man because he used to hit the ball after that,
bounced twice and carry on as if nothing had happened.
And another story about him is that he told me this and he told me against himself he'd been during the war.
He was in charge of the radiotherapy department in Sheffield. And then he'd gone to the London hospital and he used to go when he was in Sheffield.
He used to drive his physicist to they had a facility in Buxton where they used to go.
And I remember one night he was driving me back from London and he was a dreadful driver.
I couldn't see where he was going and anything like that.
And he told me the story about going up to Buxton and he'd hit a patch of ice and he the car had spun completely round.
But as it was going in the same direction as it had started off, he thought he'd carry on.
And the story got back to him in Sheffield through the grapevine that his physicist had said he wasn't going to drive with that man,
but because he turned the car right round and never even noticed.
And then we're going to of national meetings or meetings in London.
Yes, I was I joined the National Association, which you couldn't do that until you became a consultant.
And I think I joined as an associate member because I was an or urologist.
But but I used to greatly enjoy the meetings of the section of urology of the RSL.
Yes. And I used it when I was a lad in London. I used to say these people come up from all over the place.
And I'm amazed really, because we didn't always get a particularly good programme.
But one of the chaps who I great greatly admired and was hugely helpful to me when I came to Oxford was Conrad Lato,
who was a general surgeon but did all the urology reading right.
And he used to come up to the RSM with an arm full of x rays and ask the various people particularly bad, not my boss.
And he I know the press that he would come all the way up to London for this.
And they and but when I came to Oxford, I realised exactly what why they came up because you were very isolated,
very lonely and nothing quite like this. And I knew needed someone to share your.
Problems with so did you talk to John Bagno because he was a cousin of yours, wasn't he?
Yes, he was. Yes, I got on very well.
And on that note, I think, uh. And he was a nice man.
Yes. Very good physician. Yeah. There wasn't much you could do for cancer of the prostate in those days, I'm not sure there's much you can do now.
I think it's one of these diseases that's fairly, grossly over treated.
And I thought it was grossly over treated in the States when I was there.
When did you become knotted in opposition?
Did you give that up eventually? I was never a physician.
I was sorry. So sorry. No, no, no, that's fine.
I gave it up when my seven years after I came to Oxford, I was working flat out and it was generally recognised that I couldn't cope.
And so we appointed Grif fellows. We we didn't have facilities for him in Oxford.
So I made a joint appointment with Stoke Mandeville and he did the the spinal unit in Stoke, mentally ill.
And that was an interesting story in itself in that they.
The advert, it said they wanted this as a urologist for Stoke Mandeville.
And they didn't specify that it was for the spinal injuries.
And I had severe flak from several general surgeons in Stoke Mandeville.
And I can remember driving out with a chap called Pledger who used to work for the, uh, what would it be called?
What Alex Gatherer became a community physician or public health?
Yeah, public health. And this chap went out and one of a chap who'd been my registrar was his name.
And he attacked me because he said he had to dip in and they were all up in arms.
Yeah, Jeffrey had failed and it was the same.
But they they attacked me and quite clearly wanted to protect their own private practise.
You bet. And there was this chap Pledger, who I knew had I'd found out had six children and he was working on a salary right now.
So I just said to him, well, you see what the sort of thing you're up against.
Yeah. Yeah. And then once and then at the time, Gruskin, were you both entirely urological.
Was Grif doing. No, no, no. Grif never did any general,
but he was a well trained urologist and and he did the spinal injuries unit at Stoltmann Dorville, not the general surgical.
And he used to do that two and a half days a week or something.
He had four sessions there and five sessions in Oxford or something like that.
But you gave a general surgeon general surgery seven years after his death.
And looking back, have you ever worked as hard as in the seventies?
I don't think I did that. I mean, I worked longer hours because when I was a housemen that you see, you were on call for six months.
Full stop. Yeah. Yeah. And but I worked very, very hard.
And my father used to say she'd brought our children up as a one parent family, but then we all did.
They were always, always on call is and never off call.
And how did you get on with the various professors.
Um, well I got on well with uh I always got on well personally with Alison, although he was quite a strange man.
Uh, and, uh. Judge Pickering, I got on quite well with him.
Uh, hello, I can remember one time, uh.
He he referred me a patient and.
Did what was necessary in this chat, then went back to bickering and I think it was a private patient,
and then George said, well, you guys in the ward now and this time didn't like it.
So when did you give up the research sessions? Well, the research sessions were.
They were they carried on for several years and one had to produce the research to justify them, although I wasn't being paid any money.
But the real change in my research came when Alison Brading yeah.
With whom I had a great deal of contact, I realised I was too busy as a practising clinician to even supervise research.
And so that's one of my research chaps called Tim Philp, who I saw the other evening.
And he, uh, he was doing a thesis on cooling the bladder as possible, cause treatment for bladder instability.
And he went along and saw Alison Brading.
Now, she had succeeded a remarkable lady who was in the pharmacology department and who was a world expert on smooth muscle.
It will bring Edith Bilbrey to the gathering. Well, we were talking about Edith Bell Ring,
and I went to see the bowl ring and I talked about the problem of the unstable bladder and she suddenly went very cold on me.
And I had no idea why she did that, but I didn't think I could make much progress.
But later, when she retired, I was asked, see her?
And she was in Professor Morrises ward.
And so I think it's only when you find out the whole history of people that you learn to explain.
Absolutely. I quite agree. So, Alison Brading. Yes, I'm Alison Brading has been a great co-operator.
And I used to when Edith Boring retired and Alison Alison became reader,
then I got a real cooperation going and I used to supply her with raw young surgical registrars.
And she she's a very stern lady, Alison Brady, and she used to turn them into proper scientist grade,
which is something I could never have done a very good for everybody else.
Absolutely. And I think that's the pattern that has been gradually, gradually taking place in Oxford ever since,
is that there still isn't enough cooperation between the medical school and the university.
I agree with you. So now you and I were fancying yourself doing transplantation of the kidney.
Well, we did the first transplantation.
I was involved in that. And this was before Peter Morris arrived.
And I got the I've got the cutting from the Oxford Times, which first kidneys, which it's called.
And it was a young girl from Abingdon who had and we'd been working up to this and practising.
John Ledingham was the lead physician. Uh. Uh.
Patterson, yes, he was a plastic surgeon, plastic surgeon, and now young lady was a physician, vascular surgeon.
Yes, I'll of cunning, cunning did the thing and, uh, what's his name?
He's got a beard and I see him walking around. OK, so he's still alive.
But the pathologist or regular Patterson?
Oh, yes. No, he's got a he's got a beard. Yes. Yes. What's his first name.
I'm just trying to think they used to know. I know. Came or.
No I forget and I. And that went well, your transplant?
Well, if it went all right, the patient died, but I'm not sure the transplant produced much urine.
Right, right. And then after that, they clearly needed to do something about it.
And they appointed Peter Morris. And I was quite glad to back out of it, although I.
I used to go and harvest the kidneys. So I remember going Northampton and Swindon harvesting kidneys.
Were you on the appointments committee for Peter? I don't think I was.
I think Tim Tebow was the surgical presence.
I was on the Appointments Committee for Deaths.
Oliver, right. Who was appointed as a as renal physician, ran the transplant, the dialysis.
You had Nasrat. And, uh, but I don't think I was.
No, I don't think I was on Peter Morris's point.
No, I'm sure that was a university thing. Yes. They wouldn't have had a plan.
Well, they were funny about that. Yes.
And then also, I was on appointments committee for an anaesthetist had John Hayneville, who lives in Woodstock now.
And you would never get a surgeon on the anaesthetics appointment committee down there.
Then at some stage, you were president of the Urological Association.
Yes. That wasn't till a lot later. Right. I've been president of both urological organisations and country.
First of all, I was president of the section of urologic the wrong side, right?
Mm hmm. And then I was president of Paris in 92 to 94.
And following retirement, I became president of the Medical Defence Union.
Right? Yes. Which has always been a big interest of mine.
Well, that must've given you a lot of insights. Oh, and a huge amount.
Yes. But how do you think the Oxford School was developing?
Do you think? Well, I, uh, we used to talk about the dentist that had a big lift up in 66.
Yes. When there were six new appointments and Bob Duffy, Malcolm and myself and surgery and yourself, John and Peter slidin.
And I think that you can trace the, uh, the rise in eminence of medicine and surgery from from that 66,
I think, and from getting the Cambridge students across.
That made a difference. I think that made a huge difference. Um, no, no.
It was, uh, uh, that's been great or anything with the way you feel.
Oxford went wrong later on during it during your time. Uh.
No, it was always that we were constraints, financial constraints, and I think given the facilities, we did pretty well.
How did you enjoy the move to the John Radcliffe? Well, uh, I didn't actually move to the John Radcliffe.
The surgeon who did the first move was Malcolm Golf.
And and I've always maintained a strong base in the church hospital.
And it's it's now a very strong base because I started urology on a part time basis, being a general surgeon.
And David Cranston was in here the other evening and he told me that he thinks there are about 12 percent.
Well, what about the husband? Do they falling to bits around your head?
They were they were all right. And I can I can remember going to see patients in the hospital wards.
And I they were just wards, as far as we know.
No, indeed. They all seem to be all right to me. Yeah, no, no.
I think they were all right. The room I have.
I know what you want to say that I haven't asked you about. Well, I.
I'm not sure. I've written out I'm writing my own story now and I've written out quite of course, my great grandfather did it in for his life in 1902.
And I spent a lot of time last year typing that out. Right.
Uh, some of it's in the last round. So did you grow up in Manchester in that area?
No, I Lancaster. Right. Lankas and like Manchester was the big time when you wanted to go and see a specialist.
My great uncle had been professor of surgery and thought, yes, in Manchester,
and he was known as Fat Smith because he one time three housemen got together and put his some brown belt.
He was a great territorial army.
He'd been out to South Africa and, uh, and three housemen, got his brand belt around them and buckled it up.
And Hugh Brown, I don't know if you knew Hugh Brown, but I used to play real tennis with him and his great uncle or grandfather.
I'd invented the Sam Brown belt because he had a wonky hand and he needed this belt so he could get his pistol.
And that's what made you train in London rather than in Manchester?
Well, I thought it would. I thought it would be.
I was at school in York. Yes, at a Quaker school.
All right. And, uh, I went to I didn't know where to go.
Uh, my great uncle died years before I was born.
And, uh, and so I went I applied to a lot of hospitals.
I don't think I applied to Manchester, but I applied to London hospitals.
And the only one that they had an exam for was University College.
And and there were a couple called Abercrombie, both on the faculty.
And they decided that there would be a good idea to have an examination.
And I always felt that it wasn't, uh, they never really followed that up because there was an anaesthetist who had been in Manchester
who came here who did a lot of follow up of what had happened to people in various echelons.
And I would have thought this was a very good way of finding out what had happened.
Yes. Yeah. I mean, the trouble is, it's such a long time scale.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And how much of the Oxford countryside did you see then?
Well, we lived just south of Oxford in Wharton when we came here.
And oh, I think Oxfords, the most wonderful place to practise,
because this students are so good and your colleagues are so good and my contact with them and and and to
you has made me realise there are a lot of very indifferent doctors around because the GP's are so good.
They're absolutely quite exceptional.
Yes. OK, Joe, you had enough and anything else you want to say?
I mean, no, I don't think I I'm very glad about the timing of my life.
Yes. Because I was born in 1931 and and I came into the health service.
So I missed the war. And then I had TB and I couldn't get called.
It was off the charts for this year. And I lived through I got TB originally at school with a plural effusion.
And then it relapsed when I was a student and the old students were all put
under the care of the senior physician who was a man called Andrew Moreland.
And he, uh, didn't believe in these new fangled antibiotics.
So. So after I qualified,
I was sent home to Lancaster and told that I should not do a house surgeon's job because it meant spending long hours and I never did.
But it certainly doesn't now. But I was very frustrated and I then was applying for all the jobs at the back
of the BMJ and there was a locum job advertised in a place called Syntel,
Fiji's Greenidge. And I applied for this and got it.
It was a terrible hospital. I told some nurse to put up normal saline and went into the side room and found her spooning salt into the drip bottle.
But it was like it was quite a good place to learn.
And then there was a job advertised at the Miller Hospital, which was a very nice voluntary hospital just down the road from some Fiji site.
And so I applied for a house physician's job there and got it.
And that was a wonderful job for a Would-Be surgeon because it had skins, uh,
cardiology and neurology, first half and chest's and children for the second half of the job.
So that was a marvellous job to have is now.
I'm surprised Andrew didn't get you some antibiotics. What was that like?
Well, this was later because I then changed to him.
He retired and I changed his junior man called Nicholson and and the third one was Peter Heve.
Oh, yes, yes, yes, he does.
Well, it was his father. He was in Wales.
But ah, best of all, I met my father.
They're very good. Very good.
Note to end. And thank you very much indeed, David.