Forty-five years ago Lord Platt and two of his colleagues sat down for a meeting over lunch in the RCP’s Heberden Room. Not a particularly exciting or unusual event, you’d be right in thinking, except that this meeting was being recorded. The voices of the three men whisper from the archive and reveal information about their lives, the RCP and the society of the day that it would be almost impossible to elicit from other sources.
The Royal College of Physicians’ oral history collection is a rich, but under-used resource. Lord Moran, Lord Rosenheim and Ina Cook also made recordings and there is a collection of video interviews filmed in partnership with Oxford Brookes in the 1980s. The participants are almost all now dead, legends of RCP memory. The recordings ensure that their voices, as well as their work and their portraits, survive.
Oral history, ‘tells us less about events than about their meaning … . Interviews often reveal unknown events or unknown factors about known events’.
We all know about the discovery of penicillin. Many also know of the role that RCP fellow Charles Fletcher (1911–1995) played in its development. But because somebody in 1986 thought to record his memories, anyone, now, can hear him tell the amazing story of how he administered the first ever dose of penicillin, to a policeman dying of an infected scratch from a rose thorn. Of how the dying patient rallied dramatically, was sitting up, eating, was on the verge of recovery. Of how his doctors desperately tried to filter the meagre supply of the drug from his urine to continue the course, and of how they eventually failed. Fletcher’s voice reflects the wonder, hope and despair that the team must have felt at the time.
The RCP archives are full of such memories. Archibald Cochrane (1909–1988) tells us of his pioneering work on randomized control trials, but he also weeps as he recalls how he tried to care for inhabitants of a prisoner of war camp and begged the Nazis to stop using his medical orderlies as target practice. Sir Raymond Hoffenberg (1923–2007) tells us of his fight against apartheid in South Africa. Lord Moran recounts how he brought together Winston Churchill and the war time cabinet at a splendid lunch at the Savoy in 1944 to show their support for the establishment of the NHS.
Often the stories demonstrate how much society has changed. Ina Cooke speaks of her fight to be accepted into the male-dominated world of the college, to the extent that she wasn’t even allowed to hang her coat up in the hall. Two former fellows discuss how, if you have a personal secretary it’s acceptable to employ a woman, but if you want a company or organisational secretary you ‘really need a man'. You would be sacked for such sentiments today, but these men were simply reflecting the prevailing beliefs of their time. Oral history brings them to us in stark relief.
Building on the work of former Harveian Librarian, Charles Newman (1900–1989), and the Oxford Brookes project, we are now adding to our oral history archives. Over the past few months we have recorded stories of fellows’ experiences of Changi prison in Singapore, of caring for casualties of the Dunkirk evacuation, of trialling chemotherapy treatments for leukaemia, of establishing the first renal dialysis units and of London smogs and Nightingale wards. Future generations will be able to hear, not just read, of RCP fellows’ pioneering work, their struggles and successes.
Gradually we will be putting all recordings, both new and old, online. In the meantime listen to the extracts below and come to the archive to have a listen to more. You will discover a whole new dimension to some of the characters of RCP history.
Sarah Lowry, oral history project officer
Quotation from: Portelli A. What Makes Oral History Different?. In: Perks R. and Thomson A. (eds), The Oral History Reader. London: Routledge, 1998.
Read more about our collections on our weekly blog, and follow @RCPmuseum on Twitter.
Oral history interviews from the ‘Voices of medicine’ project are available via the RCP library catalogue. For more information about the oral history project please contact sarah.lowry@rcplondon.ac.uk.
Audio extracts and transcriptions
Sir Charles Fletcher tells of treating the first ever patient with penicillin
Now the first thing was to see if by any chance this drug, which had been so harmless to mice, might be acutely toxic to human beings. And the remarkable thing is the first thing I was asked to do was to find someone who was dying, inevitably dying of some disease, in whom it wouldn't really matter ... if the first injection proved fatal. We wouldn't do it that way nowadays at all, but at that time it was done. And I found a very nice lady who was unfortunately dying of disseminated cancer and I asked if she would mind having an injection of a new drug that might be helpful to people, although I didn't say it would help her, and she agreed to the injection. So Florey came along with an ampule of the drug, with Witts, and we went into the ward, filled this ampule with this yellow fluid, because the extract was yellow in those days from the yellow excretion of the mold from which penicillin was grown, and I got a syringe out and injected it into the vein of the patient. And about 3 hours later she had an acute raise of temperature, she had a rigour fever, so that showed that the penicillin at that time had a pyrogen or something that produces fever in it. And Florey worked away in the laboratory with rabbits to get rid of this, to purify it still further and get rid of it, and then he had a substance from which he had removed the pyrogen as shown with rabbits. And then I had the job of finding out which way this penicillin could be given. Obviously we tried by mouth but it was destroyed in the stomach, we tried by the other end of the alimentary canal, by rectum, and we decided that the only thing we could do with the very scarce supplies then available was to take it intravenously. Now, what about a patient? Well the Radcliffe infirmary like all hospitals had a septic ward and I went down there to find somebody who had a serious infection with a germ which could not be cured by other drugs but penicillin might cure, and there was a policeman there, a delightful man, who had been in having septicemia with boils breaking out all over him, he'd lost one eye from the poison, he had boils all over him and he was in a desperate state, and we started penicillin and it was absolutely miraculous. The next day he said for the first time that he was feeling better, his temperature came down, and so it went on for 4 or 5 days, and then the supplies of penicillin were so scarce that I used to collect his urine in the evening each day and bicycle with it over to the Dunn Laboratory where Chain and Florey would be waiting to hear the latest clinical news, and I would give them this urine and they would extract the penicillin so that the patient could have on the third day the same penicillin he'd had on the first day. But in spite of this it was necessary ... on the third or fourth day the penicillin ran out and it hadn't completed curing his infection. The poor man then deteriorated and died about a week later.
The oral history interview with Charles Fletcher is from the Oxford Brookes Medical Sciences Video Archive, http://www.brookes.ac.uk/library/speccoll/medical/. A copy is held at the Royal College of Physicians.
Dr Brandon Lush remembers treating the casualties from Dunkirk
In May 1940 the medical officer in charge of the hospital got a message to say that within 24 hours we would be receiving a train load of dozens of casualties from Dunkirk. And so we had to evacuate practically all the civilian patients from the hospital and we were divided up into teams. Because I’d done surgery I was allocated to the surgical team. We had pairs of them, I and one other did surgery and two others did anaesthetics, taking in turn, two others did triage sorting the patients out and so on. So in 24 hours we organised to deal with all the Dunkirk casualties, oh and of course two others did blood transfusions. And miraculously we dealt with the whole lot and the way it worked, well most of them had metal fragments that needed to be removed, although, I’m not sure all were necessary, and the way it worked was the anaesthetist ... we had two operating tables in the theatre and one surgeon and two students and one anaesthetist, and the anaesthetist would anaesthetise the first patient while the second patient was put on a table, and then the surgeon would get down to whatever was necessary by way of operation, removing foreign bodies, setting fractures, putting in plates or what have you, and then he would move to the second table where the patient was already anaesthetised and I would finish doing the sewing up, and the same it went on and so forth. I think, other than for what you might call toilet purposes, I think we hardly left the theatre for the next 24 hours, and by and large the end results were excellent.
Dr Norman Jones remembers helping to establish the first renal unit at St Thomas’ Hospital
It was easy to be blinkered in nephrology; when I was a junior doctor, certainly as a student and junior doctor, kidney failure was just death, there was nothing else, and this revolutionised that, even the primitive methods by today’s standards of the later ‘60s. In ‘68 for instance, the normal sentence, in a sense, for regular haemodialysis, was 15 hours three times a week, and if you developed certain complications, like neuropathy it was more, and that was a tremendous chunk out of the week. I remember when our unit was being built and it opened in the summer of ’69, we were granted the use of two rooms in the intensive therapy unit at Thomas’, in which to do our dialysis and we could obviously only cope with a very few patients, but by the time that we could move into the new unit, we had seven people on regular dialysis going through that pretty well non-stop little unit, but what I do remember is that when we had our, and of course methods were nothing like as sophisticated then as they are now, but when we had our 21st birthday party as a renal unit, five of those seven were there, 21 years later. That, I think, is one of my happiest memories.