Well, Trevor, it's great that you've agreed to give an interview about the Oxford Medical School and its doings,
and first of all, I could ask you how you came to come to Oxford.
Yes, I, uh, I was in the army, as you know, and, uh, at the end of my Army service, national service, uh, in the beginning of nine,
January nineteen fifty seven, uh, I came to Oxford, having been to two years at St. Mandeville Hospital.
It was a senior registrar appointment to the Oxford Pathology Services starting in St. Mandaville and finishing off in Oxford.
And I came to Oxford sort of January fifty seven.
So was there a lot of neuropathology with Ludovic Goodman says they could have been pretty me.
Yes, but with a lot of spine. Oh yes. Yes, yes.
I did a great deal of work on the on the preserved stuff and on the autopsies I did on and on the people who have been paraplegic for years,
nearly all army, British army. And then I came to Oxford and I did quite a lot of haematology at Oxford to do two years with Peggy Pickles.
And I was quite near to Linowitz calendar, whoever it was.
A lot of haematology in Oxford. Yes. And of course it was the Rocksmith was quite a book and the book from History of Haematology.
He was a historian even then. Was he more than I actually am in the present?
I think as historian from student, yes. Yes.
And so when you interstate, you knew you'd come to Oxford. Oh, yes.
So what made you apply to the state? Because you wanted to work in Oxford?
So it was very interesting to work with the spinal injuries unit on the pathology.
You know, that was very interesting. But what made you want to come to accept them?
Well, who wouldn't I say?
I mean, the people there or what I knew linowitz a little bit.
And I had heard of the the work of thrombin activity, Rosemary Big and McFarlan, and they were really quite famous.
Yes. And I had started off in haematology in Manchester.
But I don't I don't. Six months haematology with Geoff Wilkinson.
Yes. And that resulted in me being a junior specialist in the Army.
Right. So I was I was in the Eastern Command laboratory, which you probably just remembered.
You were in Southern Command. I think it was also in the Listman laboratory, guys.
Anyway, so we had a very good lab service with er I mean what they sent away I didn't know but um.
Yeah. And when I came across we were still open but still taking cases.
Yes. And the non-polluting was the consultant there to the army.
Yes. Judy. For neurosurgery. And of course Ritchie used to go out there to see cases and on honours particularly.
And so when you done your haematology in Oxford, you then rotated into neuropathology in Oxford?
No, no. I wanted to do the neuropathology, but I was too valuable to be spared from.
He would have done quite a bit. And I said the blood transfusion immunologic could deal with immunology.
I worked a lot on the Nevius, which was published by Pickle's after I left.
I think that was quite interesting stuff. The when I came to Oxford, uh uh, the Alisson had been appointed as professor of surgery sometime before,
but Pickering had just been appointed and hardly arrived and his unit was being built.
Yes. That sort of pavilion corrida was being built for him and causing a great deal of difficulty to the hospital because they were so small,
the hospital and. There really wasn't room for a Regius that wanted to have beds and run to department.
You were part of that. So you'd know that when you came to Oxford, how did you think it compared with Steg?
So Mandaville was a man who was just a little hospital in the stick, so to speak.
It had it had just a competent pathologist, bacteriology that just ticked over.
There was nothing there that merited a medical school tuition.
Yeah, I mean, Oxford is quite different, but struggling terribly from all sorts of poor decisions in the years before.
And I read quite a bit about it a couple of years ago.
And Oxford Radcliffe Infirmary has caused endless trouble in the Department of
Health because of refusing to do things and doing things that they wanted to do.
But it was mostly by the old gang of surgeons,
physicians wanting to stay and stay in the Radcliffe Infirmary and not really wishing to consider a bigger hospital up the hill.
Because, you see, we own and we own the site, which is now donative hospital, that we didn't own the church on one foot because they were reaching.
And you see, it was a very important distinction there.
The Board of governors on Radcliffe and the site of the practise, they didn't own the other one,
which was a great pity because whilst we were building it, the organisation changed and we did.
It was only one organisation then. And what specific decisions do you think were bad with actual votes on what they should do?
Well, I've only really looked at it after 1948 when the NHS began.
Before then, it was a very small hospital with some very good physicians and surgeons there.
There was no consultant system, really. And then came the National Health Service for State, and everyone was made to consultants,
including some that perhaps were more like general practitioners, the consultants.
But coming as I had from Manchester, I was shocked at how backward the medical services were.
In Oxford, for example, we didn't have a dermatologist right now back in Manchester in the 40s,
we had a skin hospital and about six consultant dermatologists with outpatients knowing what we had was Dr Mallett, remember?
Well, yes, but also maybe Alice can't do that because she was always called a dermatologist.
And and Pat did the mythology that that man was officially the dermatologist never knew that
because I always thought he was a general physician with a penchant for endocrinology,
sewed himself. I mean, and maybe that's why I never saw I was working and he never told me, but there really wasn't.
And I mean, that's just an example, because in cancer therapy, there was no cancer department of any sort was there in Manchester with radiotherapy.
There was a whole hospital. Yes. The cancer hospital.
Radim Institute. Yes. The whole Ross Patterson. About ten surgeons there and a huge laboratory.
We only got that in Oxford in about five years ago.
Yes, that's right. So we were 50 years behind it.
Manchester, I don't know what Manchester right now, but that was the 1940s cancer hospital.
Oh, about six or seven very good surgeons. And then X-rays, of course, radiotherapy and above all, laboratories to research cancer.
And of course, we had nothing at all. What were you doing?
General postmortems in Oxford? Yeah, I was doing a general post-mortem.
So statement. Yes, but not in Oxford.
I only did the neurology on it, so when you left the haematological pathology, then you started doing area pathology, that right?
That's right, yes. Yes, there was a lot of pressure to make me a haematologist.
Yeah. And Rob Smith was very keen on me becoming the consultant haematologist there.
But of course, Macfarlane was very loyal to shop and shop.
Right. And I was quite rightly made the consultant and I was left alone with me in neuropathology without which I wanted to do anyway.
Yes, because haematology even then was obviously not exactly a dead end, but there was not much future for a whole range of activities in haematology.
And it is because finishes at nine a.m. and there was a big sort of sorry, fine.
And the leukaemia was coming in and the Hodgkin's disease and all that.
But it it was it was ceasing to be a laboratory job for a consultant haematologist.
Yes. And they all really had to get their memberships and become consultant physicians with a
Bedzin they into which they admitted most of the cases of leukaemia and Hodgkin's disease.
And that's why things so I could see really that laboratory haematology was coming to an end.
But it's going to be more technical. Yes.
Also, the machines that come in is because when I started haematology, you did most of it yourself down the microscope.
But now the machines were doing all the major indices of haematology.
So they really needed technicians to run the machines and not consultants.
It was not a matter of puncture, I suppose. So I was really I was not looking to get out of haematology,
but I could see it wasn't it wasn't going the distance that other bits of pathology where you went as junior to Oppenheimer, is that right?
Well, actually, I was a senior because he was he was qualified after I died.
So he'd done he'd done a degree in and the wall and then that.
So he was a late starter. Right. So although I was in his department, I was really his senior.
Right. And but he was such a magnificent brain.
He was a wonderful son. He knew a lot of anatomy.
And of course, he knew the neuroanatomy. I knew the pathology. So together we made a good pair.
And I mean, at that time, we were doing whatever it was, weekly or fortnightly brain cutting sessions.
They were always weekly. Yes, they had been started by Hugh Cairns and they were very much tailored to the neurosurgeons.
But Richard also wanted to join them until he began to want his own weekly tests.
But you see, Richard Russell then was at the Churchill. Yes.
And before that and before I had the Churchill, he was at Stoke Mandeville, where Richard Russell, when I was a stoltmann,
know that the new Department of Neuropathology consisted of a chair and a filing cabinet outside the office of the neurosurgeon's.
That was the Department of Neurology. There was outpatients.
Yes. But that, of course, was a general outpatient facilities devoted to neurology on that day or perhaps two days.
So Ritchie was located really at the state mental hospital for his patients.
That got plenty of beds there. Yes. So he did quite well. And then it was at the Churchill.
Ritchie moved from Stoltmann to Churchill and on a Smith tells, which is folding.
When you came late, you know, Spalding was there.
He'd been a challenge, but he was there. He'd been during the war is not since Hughes and subsequently in Italy and all that.
And John Spaulding was he was a great doctor, you see, because he'd done classics at Oxford and that new college from Eton.
And then came the wall. They wanted medicine after the war.
So he was a bit behind in the. John, he's a very good classicist, right?
Yeah, well, it's quite helpful not to make it classics.
Yes, yes. And yes, he was a charming man, too, and a very good friend, John Spalding.
But he got mixed up with the anaesthetists. Right. Because, uh, Lord Nuffield had had given the directive the first iron lung for people with polio.
Yes. And then subsequently, Nuffield gave an iron lung to every major hospital in the UK.
We had one, for example, in Manchester, Nottingham. Right.
And of course, these people who are totally paralysed with an artificial respiration.
And John Spalding became very interested in that. And he and Cramton Smith sort of developed the, uh, the respirator.
And the successor of the iron lung, which was the iron lung, was a you must have seen a huge coffin of steel, but it became a curious respirator.
And it was designed by Richard Russell and John Spalding and Cameron Smith and Schuster and Schuster.
Yes. Yes. Perhaps it was. But, you know. No, I don't.
And and so John Spalding became almost exactly you couldn't possibly call him in at least a spot in respiration who became.
That's right, and of course, this is Joe Johns.
Crimes have been working together for years and they went sailing together for years afterwards after that.
Yes, but I mean, John Sperling had done a lot of work on shrapnel, bullet injuries to the head with your coat.
Mean he is I mean, his doctorate, as it were, was the stuff from Hampton.
A lot of people, Hampton visible injuries. He did the visual fields and where the bullet was on the X-ray because it showed up,
you know, and and Dorothy Dorothy Russell, was she still a name in the department?
Oh, yes, very much. Her name and all her her records were there.
But of course, she had long gone. And she she didn't really enjoy her time in Oxford.
She was a London hospital product. Yes. And she thought Oxford was a bit of a backwater and had to be persuaded strongly by a few cans to come here.
And as soon as the war was over, in spite of his insistence that she stay, she returned to London.
And, of course, got the chairman in 2003 and during the war and the Cairns and Hughes,
did they do a lot of proper neuropathology on the servicemen, the head injuries?
Yes, yes. Yes. Good. Yes. And that was done by Dr Russell. Right.
And my technician had done some of the work.
Uh, the technician who's now died of Tugwell know his name,
but he had he had even worked with Ortega because Ortega had preceded Dr. Russell in Oxford.
Yeah, I never knew that. Well, you see, the civil war happened is.
And so he came out of Spain.
He went to work in Paris with Close Vincent's great neurologist and you can recruit him from Paris and he came to Oxford for about four or five years.
He couldn't speak English, never learnt them. And he was very distinguished man, but he didn't fit in Oxford.
And soon after the war ended, he went to South America, to Buenos Aires, where he started up for neuropathology school.
So was there a hiatus between Dorothy Russell and you and Oppenheimer?
Yes, there was. Yeah, well, it wasn't.
Dorothy Russell went back to the London hospital and we were we then had Peter the who.
I know the chap. Peter Klump. Yes. Yes. And Daniel.
Peter Daniel. Yes. From Cambridge. Yes. And he was he was really a physiologist, but he took up neuropathology.
He did it extremely well and was an expert on the pituitary gland and did a lot of work on pituitary with Harris.
Yes, it was Harris was the professor of anatomy in Oxford.
And and he and Peter Daniel did a lot of work on the particularly the the anatomy of the pituitary gland,
the blood supply of it, and a lot of the work.
Then Harris became the professor at Tenma Hill, the most important thing.
Right. And because, of course, that the was Peter Daniel was persuaded to go from Oxford.
Right. And then Harris was made professor at Oxford.
And so we had the extraordinary business of Harris and Peter Daniel working together for years.
And then, uh, Harris had gone to the Maudsley, Peter Diluent.
Samantha Harris came back with Peter.
Daniel had to stay there, but he used to come back, uh, by the back door and work in my department actually quite early.
It was used to use the pathology facilities. Were you on the second floor and, uh, Pickaninnies department or were you in the Department of Pathology?
Mainly? Well, we started off in the top floor and a three, but and that was fairly rather cramped circumstances.
But everyone was cramped in those days. Yes. And it was it was theoretically and actually aware that the Nuffield three had been built by
Hugh Cairns was a lightweight structure on top of a field for all the Nuffield professors.
And one of the rooms was of a professor anaesthetics.
One was obstetrics, gynaecology, Qasm Royal, and one of them was surgery first.
And of course, these various professors had got their own departments built and so they were not there.
There are some ways to come. They a bit. But that was the and then the library at the end of the year, because that's where the brain cutting session.
That's where we showed the brains in a long time ago.
And Sabrina Stretch, was she in the department now?
Sabrina was an immigrant from Berlin.
She was German Berlin doctor, very young.
She came well, I think she came as a child and she did medicine in Oxford.
Uh, I suppose she was somewhere or someone and but she remained in Oxford and she did neuropathology
and then went with Peter Daniel to the Maudsley and but she always hankered after Oxford.
I think she's back here still alive, that she must be late 90s now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And how did you feel?
I mean, you said a word about Gillian Spaulding. Any comments about Charles with witty and honest man?
Well, let's just finish with John's. Baldhead is very competent neurologist.
He was also a very charming, gentle, cultured man, and he, uh,
he used to the system was that you were appointed as a consultant neurologist somewhere,
but you worked in Oxford and he really was supposed to look after Northhampton in country.
Yeah, I did it extremely well. And then came he took a bit early retirement because you remember how there's a freeze on medical salaries.
And it transpired that if you if you retired at 60, you you were on half salary, full salary,
but half pay and then you got increments, whereas the others who were working didn't get any money.
So he retired and it was better off in retirement.
And of course, it was getting a bit tough to go to Northampton and Kettering once a week, but he was still doing that right up to retire.
So, yes, I mean, he wasn't hard up in a sense, but he told me that he'd retired then because he'd read the day he retired at 60.
Your age at death was five years more. You know, the longer five years right now, which has proved to be correct.
Yes. It's been going strong. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Um, then, of course, in return, he he also had a lot of research students.
He was very good at postgraduate research, more physiology than anything else.
And they were small trickle of really good research.
Workers came to John Spaulding and then of course, came Brian Matthews says.
And of course, you see, instead of coming to John Spaulding to do neurology research, they met Brian Matthew.
What are you saying roughly, that if somebody had applied to do research under Ritchie, he would pass them to John Sperling?
Well, they would come direct talks. All right, OK,
maybe she was getting older than his and his work on polio was disappearing and he didn't have what she had all sorts of wonderful ideas.
But she was a difficult time and extremely charming on the outside.
But on the inside, he had a lot of people had difficulties with Richard.
But it's very true, although they had all these ideas, he wasn't the experimentalist.
I mean, he wasn't a research that sense now. And, of course, in the war, he done all that on head injuries, which is massive,
where he had and he was really just enjoying himself in a frivolous way, but in a relaxed way.
He was reacting. So other people did come to work for him.
They found out that they would always turn to this mound of stuff on head injuries.
Yes. That they had to somehow find somewhere some sense out of it.
But whereas is John Spaulding was more physiologies and he had he had acquired develop skills of physiology and physiology could learn later.
He was one of the research students and working to get back to work and went up to Scotland.
And, uh, I may have the name wrong.
You bought a piano? Yes. Oh, yes. Yes, I remember the piano.
Uh, it actually was harpsichord right there. And he yes, he was a student of John Spalding's and a very good one.
And he went to China. Turner Physiology in Edinburgh.
Yes. And his name was what? It was something like what?
It was a W. That's all I'm certain. Yeah. And not only did you come across him.
No, I've heard the name. Yeah. I didn't know him. And he was working with John Spalding, I think.
And then I met Charles Mitchell. Now, Charles was older than John, but not all that much older, but older in medicine.
And he's been educated Clifton School in Bristol,
and he done come to actually did Bresnitz college undergraduates and I think he was perhaps at Thomas's right hospital.
Yes. A and then the war came in, opted for, uh, neurology.
And he came to work with you can read it. And he was trained, as you can read it, for head to head injuries and World War Two.
But he was a little older than a little younger.
So he wasn't in the, uh, he he more or less went out in the Italian campaign after El Alamein, right?
Yeah. And he was in Italy.
I don't think he was in the Normandy invasion. And then he came back to Oxford and was made up to be consultant neurologist.
And he was a good partner to John Spaulding and have had on the show.
She was a personality. Well, on a Smith was the daughter of the elder sister.
Yes. And she was privately educated, didn't go to school, but had a wonderful tutor who insisted that she knew mathematics and anything that needed,
insisted that she got her school certificate and higher school certificate.
And then also she's very good sport. She was taught to play cricket.
She was good at almost everything. And and then, of course, it was wartime.
And she came to work with Ritchie, I suppose.
And then the tuberculosis meningitis was a scourge at that time.
And she obviously had done some work in this and then was given the meningitis unit to run.
And this was run at the pavilion up at Headington.
And your wife, Judith would know absolutely all about that. But she worked there, certainly.
Yes. Yes. And she was made by Hugh Cairns, the main reader in medicine,
which was a sort of sort of miscellaneous little extra place that you could put people in.
And I remember meeting this very reader. She was terribly nice on it.
No, no upper crust style at all. She was very down to earth and and apart from hunting and horse racing where she was collecting.
And I remember she was the main reader. And of course, you can sit long gone.
And it was a bit of an annoyance to the Nuffield readers.
Professor, did you see the reader was was a tuberculous meningitis expert.
Right. And had been for ten, fifteen years, you see.
And she was persuaded against her inclinations to become a consultant haematite neurobiologist.
Yeah, I remember the advert to Oxford requires it with a special experience that is.
And of course, I remember I said, how does it go on?
I remember meeting I said, well, we just had a glass of sherry and then she was a shift from May read it to be consultant neurologist.
And she was really she didn't have to say no.
I when I dealt with her, I used to ring in at home with her because she used to come into the ward rounds.
I go home because there wasn't any way for her to to be, you see, because the tobacco was meningitis more or less finished.
And she had a wonderful idea of, uh, tackling, uh, uh, multiple sclerosis by the injection, I think, into the into the sequence of the tuberculin.
Yes. She'd done this quite a bit. Which meningitis to try and break the block that used to develop so that the the drugs didn't
go fully down the thing because there was a block and then she so she knew all about this.
If you got, uh, research funds for this,
and it was extraordinary because she would find a couple of cases of of multiple sclerosis and they'd be injected with tuberculin into the that,
and they would have a temperature of about 107 within a few hours.
And it was it was dubious whether they had any good, but really did them an awful lot of shaking up.
And I mean, the rationality was not quite clear why it shouldn't have any effect on multiple sclerosis.
But you should ask Judith about this is I think Henry meant that it came down to review that work today for the MRC and reported negatively on it.
Yes, because there were no controls. No, none at all.
And she had a house full house physician as well as to do this work that was paid for by research funds.
Right.
And on the whole, people rather sort of drew back from this that she was a bit alone in it because they really went I don't think any any case died.
But there were some horrific, uh, high temperatures on it.
So how is neuropathology developing over the 10 years, 20 years, 30 years?
Well, you see, Peter, Daniel had made it a considerable advance under Peter Daniel.
He was a very good researcher and he attracted a lot of people.
He was also very good at putting in research money. And so he used to have one or two people who research money.
And he did excellently until he went to mostly as professor, which of course was a considerable uplift for him.
And off he went. And there was a complete, uh, uh, vacancy.
And I remember Robin Willis and you remember.
I do. I think Richard suggested that he came in and did a path and then he perhaps wisely said, no, it wasn't his scene.
And I was trying to get into the middle path.
But this was very much a university job, not a right, wasn't an NHS job because it was in the hands of Robert Smith as a sort of lecturer job.
And it was not considered the right thing for me.
In fact, I wasn't being told about it much.
And but they found David Oppenheimer, who'd been doing their anatomy with Daniel and was really coming to the end of his his support there.
And he was invited to come and do their part.
And it was a tremendous success. So he was a very unusual chap.
You knew a lot of the anatomy and he learnt a great deal about pathology.
He was a great asset. Yes and yes, and I came in about the same time that I was working in haematology,
just visiting the department, and did your techniques change a lot over the 10, 20, 30 years?
Yes, quite a lot. In what ways?
Well, the old techniques were silver on first on frozen, not frozen section was on the slide in sections of frozen sections.
And we moved to paraffin bedding, which is very much more versatile.
And I have been doing this on my spinal cords and so mandible and then came well, I started up electron microscopy.
Right. And of course, the chance of doing that in the right place.
But I managed to get plenty of space in the anatomy department,
the anatomy that had the second electron microscope in the UK, first being in London, and they had about three there.
And it's it's strange that if you if you want to use some very expensive piece of equipment,
it's usually readily available because they bought it, but there's no one to use it.
So I work quite a lot there. I mean, would you work two days a week or a half a day?
Yes, uh, perhaps twice a week. Yes. And was that a great help in interpreting what was going on?
Well, every every every thing you looked at was original.
And I mean, if you look at it as a malignant glioma down there, down the microscope, electron microscope known as the world, it's seen it.
No, but was it in advance? And knowing what was going on during life, if, you know,
did it increase the understanding of what was happening during life, when it did in Alzheimer's disease?
Absolutely revolutionised the understanding of Alzheimer's disease.
And, uh, for example, what we found was the the herpes virus in herpes and psephologists, that is.
And I mean that that was done by microscope.
They used to be a lot of arguments about brain biopsy. For that, you would look at the biopsies, which you did.
The Oxford people do them because there's all this adopts security in treatment.
And, you know, should you do a biopsy before you started that of celebrity treatment of what?
Glial, herpes, encephalitis? Sorry. I you know.
Oh, we never used the electron microscope to diagnose it.
Right. We could have done, but we didn't have the facilities, really.
And then, of course, the person whom you remember well, we had everything in this department, including the electron microscope.
But what he didn't have was anyone that could use it. So I was invited in to use it and I tried.
But of course, it was in very bad state and and anything I shouldn't touch didn't do very well.
And I eventually we got our own electron microscope in the Department of Pathology.
Yes, it was it was a Dutch job.
And I did a very large amount of work on that. About what you would that would be, I don't know, I suppose like 60s, you know.
And were you publishing? The electron microscopy were not very much.
It was, for one thing, the Internet until they actually developed journals to handle the others.
The ordinary journals didn't like it too much because there were so many pictures.
Yeah. How do you see how the pictures very expensive in those days.
But we did we publish the herpes simplex and stuff like this.
We publish that and I publish quite a bit of muscle stuff of, uh, muscular dystrophy.
But of course I was doing about four or five jumps at the same time.
What were they then?
Well, I was the consultant pathologist and I was, uh, uh, I was teaching medical students and I had, uh, uh, I became to tutor it.
And in pathology, the whole pathology here at the School of Medicine.
Oh, right. Yes. In Oxford. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
And. So, I mean, I had these this work, it was all a stolen moment for me from a lot of other work,
so I have no way that future medicine for the Oxford region, roughly 10 years it was the postgraduate tutor, right.
Is. Oh, no, I wasn't. I did about six years.
Yes. And what were you really doing then? Looking after the research students?
It was almost entirely directed at the GPS.
Right. And it was it was dreamed up by Pickering.
Right. You remember Pickering pushed for medical education.
Very hard for the country. Yes. And this was part of it, right.
That every medical school in the region, the hospital region that had a medical school,
would must have a medical tutor, uh, to to organise that to the graduate teaching, particularly of, uh, of the GP's.
It was actually framed to organise the teaching of everyone she put into surgery just to get lost.
And so it went mainly to the GPS and I did that for a year or two.
Did you have much to do with Pickering? Yes, because he was quite interested in autopsy.
Yes. And of course, I knew Mitchell. Yes, I do.
Colin Schwartz. Yes, sure. Well, they were in our department all the time because we were feeding them bits of cases.
They did that magnificent work on residences.
Yes. Which is probably happening the new as is calling swaps from the from Canada or someone from.
Yeah, he was from North America. From Manchester and Nottingham was.
Yes, we went to Nottingham afterwards, but he was from Manchester to graduate from now and could that was missing a half an hour or so.
Is that right. Yes. Yes. Well yes. The arteries throughout the body, they could do them.
And that's three of your jobs. What were the other two? Well, they were not consecutive overexaggeration.
Two guys, five together. And I was just thinking of being of being, uh, seeing a burst of green light.
OK, yes. Yes. And also, once, when John Potter was on sabbatical, no sabbatical,
use the acting warden of what I did, John Potter's work as well as my own or the director.
Nicole said, yes, yes. No, I understand. So I did that if we didn't talk about the neurosurgeon's penny back.
Yes. Oh, well, Joe Pennypacker is deserves a great biography, really, because he was a very great man.
Yes. And he came from Nashville, Tennessee.
And the story is that. But in that she came from a slightly well-off family against not he was he had shoes on their feet.
Yes. And apparently there was a great man in Nashville, Tennessee, who was a doctor from Edinburgh,
and there was a statue of him and it said from Emory University, Scotland, you see.
And so Joe decided to go to Edinburgh to see you've got some sort of medical qualification before he went.
And then he did medicine in Edinburgh, putting his funding, his own fees and everything and keep by guess what, golf pro.
Just imagine in Scotland.
A young man in his 20s earning a bit of a living at it, yes, it makes sense in a funny way, but I never knew that Major Joe was could do.
Yeah, yeah. And then, of course, he's already decided to neurosurgery and he realised that that time there was
practically nothing much going on in Edinburgh where he qualified as a doctor.
And and so he he wanted to go to Queens Square.
And so he he looked around there and as he was an American from Edinburgh Airport,
there was no question of him getting the single job of house surgeon to the neurosurgeons today.
But he did manage to get a neurology job and which was ideal because Joe as good a neurologist as any neurologist.
Yes. And so he was the national and then huge fans found him and invited him to the London hospital in Whitechapel.
And that's where he was until two cans came to Oxford during World War Two.
Yes. And Joe, I see come came with him and stayed.
And then who cans rather suddenly died. And Joe inherited his neurosurgery, but not the chair in surgery.
So, yeah, yeah. You can see the chairs had the surgery and was immensely powerful because of that,
whereas Joe had to struggle being really hear nothing much because he became a consultant and a neurosurgeon.
Yes. But he was absolutely brilliant. Do you think you can came because of the army or was he appointed in Oxford and then the army came to him?
Uh. Uh, Hugh Cairns was appointed Hugh Cairns, who decided to have a big institute of neurosurgery at the London hospital,
that he was going to do both, and then suddenly Lord Nuffield persuaded him or found him to be a professor of surgery in Oxford.
Yes. And also more or less promising that there would be more more money coming for other things.
Yes. And he was the first of the Nuffield chairs in Oxford, I thought.
And he said it was there. Is there you go. Yeah. And he more or less where he probably chose most of the others.
Yes. Yes. Because he was a very forceful chap.
Yeah. And of course, he knew exactly what was wanted. And so there was subsequent um the orthopaedic went to that spaniel's.
Yes. To Twitter. And then Qasm I was the the first of six gynaecology and the Macintosh was the same as the first.
The, uh, these they came rather quickly, I think, you know, within about two years,
they were all into it and less liquids because cans would have known the London scene.
I mean, I was married, which is Lyonel, which was, um, Lionel.
Yes. That he was just a chap I think had been.
Yes. But I think he was down. No, I'm not sure.
He was the first Nuffield professor of medicine.
Medicine. Yes. Whereas you can see the first surgeon and Macintosh anaesthetics.
And for about five or six years, the thing was in turmoil because they had all these chaps displacing old old old chaps that had been there for years.
And of course, they they would began to be funded with departments to see.
But then came the World War Two. So that was put in abeyance.
Well, they more or less went into the war. In truth, it was quite busy in World War Two.
Yes. The kittenish and you know that.
And but then as well as Pennebaker's puts a I was in there.
Yes. We'll jump. Uh, well, there's one before that, Waterloo and the the second neurosurgeon.
And he was, for example, to consult to the army when you were to, uh, which I'm sure you met.
Yes, I did. And he had come from Hugh Cairns.
And, uh, there was always a feeling that he wasn't a trainee of jumps to pay back.
He was a trainee Cairns seat. And, uh, this was slightly made because, Puru, people never seemed to be there at the right time to him.
He was always coming on the wall to find the job, had operated the lights on some dire emergency.
It should have been his all that. And yeah.
And of course, early on, while Polunin had been selected to be the the neurosurgeon at Cambridge, and wisely,
I suppose he decided that he wasn't going to go there until they built the department for him because the Addenbrooke's had no space at all.
And when I was there, there was always planning of everything.
But this is a place for Woelfel. He was a very good administrator in Wolper.
He was a poor operator, but that didn't really matter.
And eventually he moved there with great fanfare of trumpets and then, uh, he needed junior staff.
And, uh, Gleave John Bleed was the favoured chap.
Yes. Because John Jr. Pennypacker used to used to work in a sort of dictatorial way.
Benign dictator. Yes. You know, you will go to Cambridge and you go to Birmingham, all that, you know, no questions asked.
You just do what you're told. And it worked out very well.
And John went to Cambridge. Ted Hitchcock went to Birmingham.
Yes. And Sid Watkins went to London.
Well, I went to Syracuse, New York, for the came back to do the London job and said, Watkins, did you meet Sid Watkins?
I just vaguely knew him. But I know he was a young chap.
He died two years ago. Sid Watkins, yes, yes, John Cleve, it's just when I was there,
but there must be a bit of a head injury in motor racing and Joan was very influential in helmets for major bike ride.
Well, Wolf, like John Potter inherited the, uh, the crash helmet, so to speak.
And in fact, the office that took the butt put it was you can see that the best of that.
And then Walter Lewin carried on. And I've written an article on that, which.
Yes, I have. Yes. Yeah, indeed. Yeah, yes.
Well, he was such a he was a neat little man and but he was a insurgents' needs a lot of confidence that yes, indeed lacked confidence.
Right. And, uh, and whenever they were operating,
we would get a specimen from John Pennypacker from the middle of the tumour and we would diagnose it and whatever it was.
And then he close up and all that. Well, Faloon like to have specimens on his way in and the first would be cerebral cortex.
Oh, I see. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we used to say that he'd be sending us bits of skin first, if that's all the time we got into the centre,
we got a bit tired and that's he was, he was he wished to be apart from Joe Pennypacker, not his standard.
And you see mud and the water a rather funny because that Pennebaker just quietly
to present a case and Warfield scratched his head and Joe sort of revealed the.
Yeah. And the diagnosis as he thought and some said, were you in university administration committees?
And things were that came later, because when I came to Oxford, there was there wasn't a medical, uh,
committee in the university and there was a committee to which the regents attended, possibly another.
But that was our only way in to the university.
Right. If you wanted the university to do something, you had to get the Regis to stand up in the committee and say something.
And of course, he had to fight the Roman historians and the philosophers, the mathematicians, you see.
So it was pretty hopeless. Yeah. And then came the Clinical Medicine Board.
Yes. Which you probably remember beginning to go. I don't know when it began.
Yes. Well, John Potter was he was very, very early in that right.
And I mean, it was overdue because what held it up was that we had the Nuffield Committee for Medical Research and that consisted of all the,
uh, all the Nuffield professors. They used to meet about once a month and argue with each other about how much
money they were going to get to their departments from the Nuffield bequest.
You see, and this was OK to start with because there wasn't much work done.
Research was done outside. But then as the years came by, there were more chairs developed and there was a chair of neurology,
there was the chair of psychiatry, there was a chair of clinical pharmacology and quite a lot more.
And the Nuffield committee was supposed to run this, which, of course, they were not fitted to do.
And it became quite, uh, one of the annoying things about running university medicine that, uh, that the National Committee, for example,
if you wanted to do a bit of experimental work in an animal, the only way to do it was to go to the National Committee and they would come.
And how whether you were allowed to have these rats doing this, that and the other and on the whole, you know, and that sort of thing.
So they developed. They they then formed. They disbanded the Nuffield Committee,
which was becoming a bit of a failure because actually the people who didn't
have access to that field committee used to get more money in from outside.
But the Nuffield Committee used to get from the Daphne Foundation people like Richard Russell.
So it's got enormous money from it. And they went in the committee.
And so we got the Clinical Medicine Board. And I think John Potter might have been the.
One of the early chairman of it, right, but that became quite important.
And then after then, uh, Charles withI was the chairman, CNN and a very good one to tell us,
which he was really he didn't have any particular, uh, speciality that he wanted to do.
You did with migraine research. Bit of epilepsy. Bit of epilepsy.
Yes. And he was rather relaxed about anything, but he was a very good chairman because he didn't have his own particular,
uh, thing to wish to get money for influence.
Yes. And he was the he he was the the chairman of the board of the Clinical Medicine Board.
And I thought it worked extremely well. They were ex officio, uh, the regents professor, the Nuffield professor and probably the surgeon.
And then the others were elected by a democratic election.
And I was, uh, uh, I was elected to this, which is rather unusual, really, because I had become chairman of the lab services.
But remember, there was a system of three medicine, surgery and lab and radiology.
And then I was the chairman of the lab services. And this coincided with the commissioning of the John Radcliffe Hospital.
Right. And, uh, I had, uh, uh, I had been on the commissioning team for pathology and all that.
It was a surgeon and a physician. And we struggled to get this thing commissioned and all that.
And certainly the university woke up to the fact that they had contributed about a quarter of the money to build the general hospital.
It had come from the university grants committee and all that money,
and they had neglected to do anything about finding out what it was that we built or how it's going to say.
Part of their desperation was to grab me, appoint me to the board, ad hominem on by by Pulsifer,
not by election in order that they would have somebody that knew what was happening in this new hospital.
And so I became, uh, uh, I worked pretty hard at that.
And I also thought you were probably on it two or three times a year.
And I once said, yeah, I'll tell you about that.
Well, it was rather small in number twenty five.
And it was considered, quite rightly, that if have it any bigger than that, it becomes just a talking shop and nothing gets done.
So it was, uh, everyone in the room.
That's what had to do some job because you had to have someone on the regional on uh,
on the regional level and they had to have someone on the on the directive board.
I had to have someone on the on the general committee of the university.
And, uh, you really picked these people and sort of work that into you, trying to get them,
uh, elected by, uh, by the by the bits of paper circulating in voting for people.
But if they failed, then you absolutely had to have someone you used to co-opted.
And I was I think I was elected once, co-opted again.
And I did, uh, the applications job,
which was quite a tough job because you scrutinise every application for a post graduate degree for MASC to fill empty,
but not a DSC that was, I thought, too important for someone like me.
And I learnt over the years that the, uh, regulations about this I got absolutely immersed to my being so I could say instantly, you can do that.
And, uh, this chap said, OK, that chapstick and of course,
I had to accept take high degrees except their supervisors or find their supervisors and then find that examiners.
And then I had to present all the skills, say, and it was all is all fairly tough and in, uh, in term time.
But once the HVAC came, chairmen's action you.
Do anything you like, a transaction and then then the first meeting of the board in the next term,
you presented the list of 20 things you've done, you see, and as they were done, there was nothing that could be done about it.
So they waved through where some of the things I want to do in turn time,
someone woke up from their sleep and started to say, why do I have to do this?
Why are we fighting this chap to be examined? I don't you know, he's a dreadful chap anyway.
So so I did that. And actually, this is where I met Richard.
All right.
And, um, I suppose that having been chairman for so long, I became intricately involved in practically every department because of that post students,
because the examiner said pointing out that and Richard Doll really observed this and then he wanted the best of a green colour,
preferably without paying in the U.S. And that's how he got me into green college, which I hadn't really thought it was anything for me at all.
How did you find working with him, Richard, on Green College?
Oh, it was he was a marvellous champion. Yes. Yeah, yeah. And, uh, he had a tremendous brain is you figure in finance.
And he he knew very well almost everything he had to do.
I mean, if you asked him advice was wonderfully good advice.
For example, I remember there was, uh, we were short of someone to present, uh, students for their higher degrees in,
uh, uh, at the examination schools to get their degrees C, you end up at a lectern and read the thing.
And Richard just did this without the slightest bit of preparation, nothing doing it.
Then in neurosurgery, Briggs and Peter Teddy would be being appointed.
Yes, yes. Or neurosurgery was, uh, was going from it was had its highs and lows because the first thing that,
uh, the great thing was that Joe Pennebaker retired.
Yeah. And, uh, that was, uh, he retired a little early.
He was getting rather tired. It worked awfully hard.
Yes. I mean, he'd done most of the surgery for Devon and Cornwall in Southampton, just west of Oxford and Cambridge.
Yes, yes. Yes, indeed. And he managed to get people to point out.
So he was getting a bit tired. So he went and he wouldn't work when he couldn't do it, if you know what I mean.
Yeah, he would win. And then, of course, John Potter was the the his his first assistant.
And then John Potter mentioned that, uh oh, by the way, I'm going to be the regional, um, tutor.
Yes. And so I won't be doing neurosurgery. So we're going to lose Joe Pintubi hand.
And that was a shattering. Yeah, yeah. Because who's going to win?
So it's not like some subjects that that you can coast along for a couple weeks without anybody.
It's a very, very serious. Yeah, yeah. And what they did is to persuade the guys to come back from Australia.
Yes. And the guy came. I don't know whether you knew that.
Well, yes. Yes. Well, I knew very well he his family and all those children.
And they came he had been a previous student.
Potter jumped off the train and he was very good,
but he was very tough and negotiating with the guy and and he hadn't been there long when he realised that, uh, that Alesund was going to retire.
But I that's professor surgery. And he thought the guy that they would be no better to succeed Harrison than the guy that's.
And then the guy went back to Australia and then there was a bit of a period in which there
was no one really running the place and they were looking for a successor to the guy,
but neglecting to the fact that Chris Adams was there as a pretty junior surgeon, but extremely good one.
And after a while, this sort of settled down and Chris Adams was decided to see who was the lead consultant.
Yes. And they should get one or two more out of the system.
Yes. And then came the others that you mentioned. Yes. Because Chris Evans had a remarkable career and he was a very, very good operator.
Yes. I saw a lot of his work is something I remember.
Do you remember David Tibs? Yes.
Who still alive is David Tibbs was a vascular surgeon and he wasn't his speciality is was doing the blockages of the common carotid artery.
You had the thrombus there and you sent for David Tibbs and he operated and either removed from the socket excise on that.
Did you get involved with the picture yourself a bit, Chris Adams went into that room.
Yes. Chris back? Yeah. Yes, we used to do the pathology, but Chris was very good at taking up a subject.
And then if it didn't work, Chris would say stop.
Yes. And he just didn't go ploughing on it. Yeah. And he told me once or twice that the church is a very difficult place to get at.
Yeah. You know, whichever way you choose, it's difficult.
And he he he rather wished to diminish his operations on the land, but he did quite a lot.
He did indeed. He had a wonderful series with Chris. Yeah.
You, um, the other thing, too, that he was very keen on when he came was, was aneurisms.
Yes. And there was this was a terrible trouble of neurosurgery in neurology.
But someone would come in with a ruptured engine and then they would refer to the surgeons.
And after a lot of prodding yourself to operate on them and they would develop quite often intense spasm of all the cerebral arteries,
particularly the ones near the Anderson. And you operated on them.
And it was fairly desperate because, uh, you really couldn't do anything good for them.
And it was thought if you got them early before they went into spasm, you could do the surgery on that.
Or if you left them late and you could do that. And Chris started doing the early and he had a lot of fatalities.
Not his fault. Yeah. And I did some work on the, uh, on the spine.
Some, uh, it was it was something you thought you could fix, but it wasn't fixed in my time.
And then suddenly Chris decided to leave a couple of weeks and he began operating in about three or four weeks after the event.
And then the mortality was never except that some of them had died.
Yeah, yeah. But they had died outside the surgical department.
And so they see I mean, these people were often in coma for four weeks before June 19th, you know, and then they started pouring water into them.
Is that right? I live on in.
Yeah, yeah. It was a success or not.
I mean, it's pretty experimental, I think. Yes, I think so.
Yeah. They would detect the ones that you found difficult, but I mean the ones on the antigen which kind of after you were put together.
Yeah. Now what else should I be asking you about Trevor. Hmm.
I don't really know. Neurosurgery, neurology.
We've covered much of that. And how did you feel when you came to retire, as it were?
Was the subject still developing or. Oh, yeah. You know, is fantastic.
I came into neuropathology, rather,
because and I had all these spinal cord to look at and no one seemed to know anything about the pathology, the spinal cord.
And I kept at these specimens and I used to go to a back and ask people about the spinal cord now.
And I used to go to Germany that little bit more. And then I wrote my book on the spinal cord pathology, the spinal cord, which is up there.
And after then, of course, everyone used to send me specimens.
And so I. I became.
Yes, you got them specimen's around the country, if not the world.
The world is so great. I love you very much before that.
And I go to the experts. And so I wrote this little book, which is a long time, although it Luke, I remember the bookshelf up the middle.
That's right. And we are the middle six to my clinical.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean so you know, Skaf and yes I did.
And you. Yeah. So did you know him well. Oh yes.
He was a good bloke I thought a bit of a dry old stick with a very good bloke and there was a system that was very good wasn't.
And then there was a haematologist there. How about ever.
Um, no, I'm getting mixed up with there was an American who was involved with glandular fever and that sort of thing.
Yeah. That, um, the, uh, I'd like to do a little sex.
It was Alfred Lloyd Johnson tells me. Yes, he was. Yes, absolutely.
Yes. Yeah. That's great, Trevor. You must have been very pleased with that.
Yeah. Well, it just came at the right time.
Yes. And but now the neuropathology stayed at the old Clifton for quite a long time.
Yes. Was that your doing or happenstance with.
You know, it was the we were outvoted by cardiologists.
And yes. You remember the acrimonious discussions that, uh, went on for quite a while, but we grown so much.
Yes. The facilities for us in the John Rats, if we're not very big because the ER pathology had no provision whatsoever.
And Richard, when Joe Pennebaker said, oh, well, as a matter of fact, we've got a rectangle up there for my research, you can have that.
So we plan to pass the parliament up there.
And it was really quite nice. And then it was decided that neurosurgery couldn't go there.
Yes, a neurologist couldn't go out there. Yes.
And then they built the tower of law that there is an IMAX who was involved with Ritchie over the chair.
Was it the founding of the chair with the Maxwell chair initially?
And er, you know, the chair of neurology. Yeah.
Maxwell had to do with the beginning of that, you know, Pergament pressed Maxwell.
Well I don't think that's quite right. Okay. See, what happened is that his son.
Yes. Was involved in the accident and had a very bad head injury,
went into a coma and was nursed in which he ward for months and then, uh, in a coma on a child support system.
And Maxwell and his family rushed around every day and say, what are you doing?
How are you treating this chap? Can we help you in any way?
You know? And then as the weeks became months, they began to visit far less and his promises of great monetary help became a bit dim.
And eventually, after a lot of prodding, he paid out a sum of money, which was quite small, not five or ten thousand pounds.
And it came from the insurance of the car.
It was the insurance payout for the death, and I think his son was driving.
I think right. So it was all pretty murky and didn't evolve.
So the idea that Max was actually fond of the chair because the chair was almost entirely funded by polio by,
right by and because Richard Russell was very well in with polio.
Yes.
And they not only funded the chair, but rather insisted that he should be the first incumbent Ninety-two as to what his brother eventually accepted.
Yes. Anything else? You know, I don't think so.
Well, it's been a wonderful interview, really mean a lot of things that I really didn't know.
So. Well, that's great. Ending the interview.