The Physiological Society was formed in March 1876 after John Burdon Sanderson invited 19 scientists interested in physiology to his house for informal discussions over how they should react to impending legislation on the use of animals in experiments. For the first four years the meetings were fairly informal and intimate affairs, with membership formally limited to forty, and business taking place over dinner in a hotel. In December 1880 the first afternoon meeting for the demonstration of experiments and presentation of results took place, a precedent which has continued, and now the demonstrations and presentations are at the core of the Society's meetings, although dinner still plays an important part.
Savory and Moore was a firm of dispensing chemists based at Chapel Street, London SW1. The shop closed in 1968.
John Gallop born 1910; Junior posts with the Bournemouth and Poole Electricity Supply Company, 1932-1936; Technical Assistant, Bournemouth and Poole Electricity Supply Company. Designed and installed the company's first multiple earthing scheme, 1936-1942; Technical Officer, Telecommunications Research Establishment, Malvern - Deputy Leader of team developing radar transmitters for the RAF, 1942-1946; Senior Scientific Officer, Ministry of Supply Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell - leader of team developing the synchrotron, 1946-1948; Senior Cyclotron Engineer, MRC - organising recruitment of the Radiotherapeutic Research Unit's cylotron team at Hammersmith Hospital, and supervising the design and construction of the first medical cyclotron, with accompanying laboratory buildings which also contained an 8 MeV linear acceleration, 1948-1958; Senior Executive Research Engineer in charge of Gas Discharge Physics at the Nelson Research Laboratories, English Electric Co., Stafford (part of the High Temperature Physics Team under Dr R Latham at Imperial College, London), 1958-1971.
Chronology of the Cyclotron Project: Dr Constance Wood's work at the Radium Institute on comparison of radium and 22 kV X-Rays indicated that higher voltages of radiation give the best dose distribution, c 1940; 2 MeV Van de Graaff generator designed and built at Hammersmith Hospital by J W Boag for the MRC's Radiotherapeutic Research Unit, directed by Constance Wood. By 1945 the machine was near completion, but design had been overtaken by new accelerators such as the linear accelerator, 1941; Dr L H ('Hal') Gray joined the Hammersmith Hospital team to include radiobiology in the Unit's programme. He discovered that X-radiation is less effective than neutron bombardment unless oxygen is present, and since tumours tend to be anoxic, a cyclotron was needed to produce neutrons, 1945; The MRC decided to install both a 10 MeV Linear Accelerator and a 60" or 65" cyclotron at Hammersmith, the latter to provide the facilities for research into neutron therapy, radiobiology and isotope production. JWG was appointed Senior Cyclotron Engineer, having worked on the team at the Telecommunications Research Establishment, Malvern, which produced the first synchrotron, 1948; Gallop put together a team to build the cyclotron themselves, with Derry Vonberg in charge of the vacuum system, Bill Powell of the magnetic field and ion source, and Peter Waterton to design the v.f. system, based at a former Prisoner of War camp on Scrubs Common next to the hospital; Gallop undertook tour of existing cyclotrons in the USA, 1950; Proposal to cancel the whole project due to excessive quotation for building led to redesign. Sir Harold Himsworth, MRC Secretary, convened an advisory committee chaired by Sir Ernest Rock Carling, which, under the guidance of Professor Mayneord, approved the building of a 45" cyclotron; After disagreement with L H Gray, Wood submitted a report discounting all purposes for the cyclotron other than neutron therapy. Gray and J W Boag resigned and Gallop continued with the original programme: to build a machine to be used primarily for radiobiology with isotope production as a possibility.
The campaign was launched in Sep 1986. It was co-ordinated centrally from the Royal Society of Medicine, with each county in England having at least one area co-ordinator. Scotland, Wales and Ireland also had co-ordinators. In conjunction with countrywide classes the BBC ran a series of 10 minute programmes, with sequences using the life-saving techniques. The programmes were repeated a further four times. The campaign closed end of Mar 1988 due to lack of finance, although some areas continued training people who were interested, and the Royal Society of Medicine continued to produce booklets for sale. For a more detailed history of the campaign see H.1.
Dorothy Minnie Newhall was a nurse with one of the British women's units in the Serbian Army in 1915, and a Sanitary Inspector with the Serbian Relief Fund, 1916-1919. The manuscript diary bears the inscription 'Aldo Castellani, Society of Tropical Medicine, 11 Chandos Street, Cavendish Square, London W1', but is written in English and mentions Castellani in the third person (eg on 13 April 1916 'Dr Aldo Castellani arrived tonight'). The diarist's mention of the same colleagues and her return to Beckenham at the end of both this and the manuscript volume suggests that the author was Dorothy Newhall rather than Castellani.
Not given.
Sir Christopher Howard Andrewes born 1896; Deputy Director, National Institute of Medical Research, 1952-1961; died 1989.
John A.V. Bates was born on 24 August 1918. He was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge and went on to clinical training at University College Hospital, London. During the Second World War he worked on visual tracking in gunnery and control design in tanks under the auspices of the Ministry of Supply. In 1946 he joined the External Scientific Staff of the Medical Research Council based at the Neurological Research Unit at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, London, where he worked until retirement in 1978. Bates also served as Honorary Consultant Physician to the Department of Applied Electrophysiology at the Hospital.
Bates was a leader in the field of neurophysiology. At the end of the Second World War, using home-made equipment from surplus electronic parts, Bates developed specialised equipment for brain stimulation and recording. He studied the human electroencephalogram (EEG) in research into voluntary movement, a term he may have coined. He went on to study the neurological effects of hemispherectomy and later collaborated with Irving Cooper and Purdon Martin on research into Parkinson's Disease, with work on human postural and balance mechanisms.
Bates founded the Ratio Club, a small informal dining club of young physiologists, mathematicians and engineers who met to discuss issues in cybernetics. The idea of the club arose from a Society of Experimental Biology Symposium on Animal Behaviour held in Cambridge, July 1949. The initial membership was W.R. Ashby, H. Barlow, G.D. Dawson, T. Gold, W.E. Hick, D.M. MacKay, T. McLardy, P.A. Merton, J.W.S. Pringle, H. Shipton, D.A. Sholl, A.M. Uttley, W.G. Walter and J. Westcott. A.M. Turing joined after the first meeting and other other members included I.J. Good, P.A. Woodward and W.H.A. Rushton. The Club continued in being until 1958. Bates acted as Secretary and retained many of its historical records.
Bates was a member of the Physiological Society from 1949, and a member of the Electroencephalography Society (now the British Society for Clinical Neurophysiology), serving as President 1976-1978, and the Association of British Neurologists. He died on 16 July 1993.
Hideyo Noguchi was an American-based Japanese bacteriologist who discovered the agent of syphilis in 1911.
Dame Janet had a distinguished career in medicine during the interwar years, developing a standard treatment by liver for pernicious anaemia, and was a pioneer of the wartime Blood Transfusion Service, following her experiences in this field during the Spanish Civil War. She was also part of the team providing experimental food supplements to Belsen shortly after its liberation. Both these aspects of her career are reflected in these files. In 1945 she was elected Principal of Somerville College and continued to have an active career both as a scientist, working on the biological effects of nuclear radiation, and as an administrator. She was a persistent campaigner for equal pay and status for women.
Dr John Glyn, MA, MD, MRCP, DPhysMed.
The European Collaborative Hospitals (from 1983, Health Services) Survey came into being as a result of a suggestion by Professor R Logan of the LSHTM at the bi-annual meeting of the Association of Schools of Public Health in the European Region in 1977, that the time was appropriate for a joint research project comparing the input and outcome of Health Services in different European centres. An initial 8 centres were involved: Limerick, Eire; Colchester, Great Britain; Londonderry, Northern Ireland; Uelzen, Germany; Viana do Castello, Portugal; Mostar, Yugoslavia; Mikkeli, Finland; and Nor Trondelag, Norway. Norway and Northern Ireland subsequently dropped out (in 1979 and 1983 respectively) but Almelo (The Netherlands) and Skovde (Sweden) were added in 1979 and 1982. The project was to consist of a small fairly informal network meeting in regular workshops with no formal funding structure. From 1980 until 1992 regular spring and autumn workshops were held at the various centres. Some short-term and conference funding was obtained from the WHO and the EEC but no regular source of funds was forthcoming and the final workshop was held in 1992. A brief chronology of the activities of ECHSS follows on page 2.
Dr Leigh Perry Ashton (b 1908) qualified in medicine at Bristol in 1931 and worked as a medical missionary in Kenya from 1934 until 1964, apart from Second World War service with the King's African Rifles. In September 1945 he was Medical Officer at Maseno Church Missionary Society Hospital in western Kenya, where he treated 244 cases of smallpox in three months. This report records his observations and conclusions.
Sir George Godber pursued a distinguished career in health planning and education, and was closely involved in the establishment of the National Health Service (NHS). After training at the London Hospital and the London School of Hygiene, he became a Medical Officer at the Ministry of Health (MoH) in 1939. According to an interview with Anthony Seldon of the British Library of Political and Economic Science (see GB0121 GC/201/D.2), Godber wanted to work in medicine but did not want to take fees from patients. As he felt certain that there would be a National Health Service, he entered public health medicine in order to get into the MoH which, he presumed, would have the task of organising the NHS.
In the early 1940s Godber undertook a survey of hospitals in the Sheffield and Midlands area as part of a series of MoH regional hospital surveys (see GB0121 GC/201/A.4/1 for his draft survey). This work brought him to the heart of the re-organisation of the hospital side of the future health service. In 1950 he became Deputy Chief Medical Officer, MoH, and from 1960 to 1973 he was Chief Medical Officer at the MoH's successor departments, the Department of Health and Social Security, the Department of Education and Science, and the Home Office. Godber was Chairman of the Health Education Council from 1977 to 1978, and became a Fellow of many organisations, including the American Hospital Association and the American Public Health Association. He was appointed Knight Commander Order of the Bath in 1962, and Knight Grand Cross of the Bath in 1971. He married Norma Hathorne Rainey in 1935.
Richard Hunter, FRCP (1923-1891) and Ida Macalpine, FRCP (1899-1974), were psychiatrists and historians of psychiatry.
Dorothea Nasmyth (nee Maude) was a General Practitioner who wrote a diary of her experiences during the First World War.
Dr Kraemer, who left Germany in 1933 and studied medicine at the University of Siena, was an influential analytical psychologist and consultant psychiatrist, who practised in Edinburgh until 1958, when he moved to London. Details of his appointments and publications can be found in the Medical Directory, and his obituary appeared in The Times of 11 Jan 1983. The volumes date from the time when Dr Kraemer was a medical student, and apart from the first volume, which is in German, they are all in Italian. As all the volumes contain typescript or duplicated notes, it seems likely that these were standard sets of notes issued to students rather than notes taken by Kraemer himself, although he does seem to have annotated them in some cases.
Peter Dundas Grant worked for the Government Medical Service, Tanganyika (Tanzania), 1954-1962.
This organisation grew up as the result of a letter 'Doctors and Overpopulation' signed by 55 doctors, which appeared in The Lancet and the British Medical Journal, Jan 1972, which generated a large response from the profession. In order to 'function efficiently as a pressure group' a Management and a General Committee were established. The group was active until 1984 when the death of the chairman, George Morris, caused it to become rather less high profile. A 1987 membership drive failed to accrue more than a few members.
John Cary Gilson was a leading figure in the study of occupational lung diseases. During the Second World War, he was employed at the RAF Physiology Laboratory (later known as the Institute of Aviation Medicine), Farnborough. He helped to develop improved oxygen equipment for pilots and, by inventing a simple spring-loaded tape measure (measurements could be taken at the same tension so that they matched each other), he mastered the problem of measuring pilots to their uniforms. In 1946, Gilson joined the Medical Research Council's (MRC) Pneumoconiosis Research Unit (PRU) as deputy to Charles Fletcher. The unit had been established in Cardiff in 1945 to examine coal workers' pneumoconiosis: it discovered that pneumoconiosis was preventable if dust levels were monitored, and coal workers x-rayed regularly. It also ascertained that the disease was not disabling until a second complicating condition began to affect the lungs. A simple breathing test was designed to measure the degree of disability caused. Gilson himself was responsible for equipping a mobile x-ray van for use in the field. He was an expert in film reading and worked with the International Labour Office (ILO) to standardise the classification of radiographs of pneumonconioses. During the 1950s the Unit also began to study the effects of asbestos and of organic dusts such as those produced by cotton, flax and hemp, which cause occupational diseases such as byssinosis.
Biographical details of Surgeon Lt-Cmdr McGrath can be found in obituary notices in the British Medical Journal and The Lancet.
Louisa Martindale was born in 1872. She was a keen proponent of women's rights and their admission to the professions on equal terms. She received her MB from the London School of Medicine for Women (Royal Free Hospital) in 1900 and subsequently studied on the continent. Her particular interest was the use of radiotherapy for gynaecological disorders although much of her practice was of a general medical and surgical nature. She practised in Hull and Berlin for 5 years before taking the M.D.Lond. and then moving to Brighton, where she was one of the founders of the New Sussex Hospital for Women and Children, of which she was an Honorary Consultant Surgeon for many years. During World War One, 1914-1918, she served with the Scottish Women's Hospital at Royaumont (France). In 1921 she moved to London and later settled permanently in consulting practice in Weymouth Street. She was involved in the establishment of the Marie Curie Hospital in 1924 of which she became an Honorary Consultant Surgeon. She was active in the Medical Women's Federation of which she became President in 1931. In that year she was also appointed C.B.E. She was elected F.R.C.O.G. in 1933. She was elected president of the Medical Women's International Association in 1937 and kept the organisation going throughout the Second World War, 1939-1945, promoting its revival in 1946. She died in her London home on 5 Feb 1966, aged 93. Fuller details of her life and career can be found in her autobiography A Woman Surgeon (Victor Gollanz, 1951), and the lengthy obituaries in the Lancet and British Medical Journal
Refer to collection.
For further biographical details, see Munk's Roll of the Fellows of the Royal College of Physicians Volume V, pp 299-300, and obituaries in the British Medical Journal and the Lancet.
Dr Mark Exworthy's project 'Understanding health variations and policy variations', was conducted under the Economic and Social Science Research Council (ESRC) Health Variations Programme, by Dr Exworthy and Dr Martin Powell between 1998 and 2000.
Donald Drysdale Anderson was a Medical Officer of Health on the West African Medical Staff in the early 1930s. He disappears from the Medical Directory and the Medical Register in 1935. He served in Mauritius and Mexico as well as Nigeria. This report was undertaken on the basis of rumours that certain towns on the Oyo and Abeokuta Provinces of Nigeria were endemic centres of yellow fever, to estimate the cost of sanitating these towns with a view to eradicating this disease. In the Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene for 1931, Anderson published an article 'On mosquito-borne disease in South Nigeria', presumably based on these same investigations.
Professor Oertel was Strathcona Professor of Pathology at McGill University, Canada, from 1919-1938, subsequently he retired to London. Further biographical details may be found in his obituaries in the British Medical Journal and the Lancet.
Prausnitz studied in England 1905-1908 (his mother was English), and in 1933 emigrated to England from Germany, where he had been Professor of Hygiene and Bacteriology at Breslau. He became a general practitioner at Ventnor, Isle of Wight. In 1939 he became a British citizen and added his mother's maiden name to his own. Further details of his career can be found in the obituary in GC/33/4, also Who Was Who Vol VI and obituaries in the British Medical Journal and the Lancet.
It has not been possible to trace any information about R L Thompson beyond the facts which can be deduced from the internal evidence in these notebooks, i.e. that he was an undergraduate at Keble College Oxford and came from Warwick. He seems to have been at Oxford during the early 1920s, from the few loose dated items in GC/35/5. He does not seem to have become a doctor, as his name does not appear in the Medical Directory.
In the early 1960s Dr Wolff appears to have gone to work in the USA, where he held posts at Johns Hopkins and in New York and Washington DC. His name disappears from the British Medical Directory and Medical Register in 1972, but was still in the index of the USA Medical Directory in 1979.
Volunteered and served with forces guarding Suez canal, 1915; Graduated and entered general practise, 1924; MB,ChB(Dist in Medicine); Tanganyika - member of Colonial Medical Service, 1927; Appointed Tuberculosis Research Officer, 1930; MD Manchester, 1932; Invalided out of the service, 1937; Bureau of Hygiene and Tropical Disease London, 1938; Acting Director of the Bureau, 1942; MRCP Lond, 1943; Director of the Bureau, 1946-1961; Awarded CMG, 1952; Heath Clark lectures at University of London on aspects of medical investigation in Africa, 1960; President of Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 1963-1965; Edited Bulletin of War Medicine and other publications of the Bureau; jointly responsible for 17th edition of Manson's Tropical Diseases (1972). Several other publications.
Born 1885; commenced nursing training at Lambeth Workhouse Infirmary in 1906, gaining her certificate in 1909 and passing her CMB (midwifery) in 1911. She held various posts at Lambeth including Sister, Night-Sister and Sister of Linen Store until August 1914. Between August and December 1914 she was Matron of a Home for Destitute Areas, St. Giles, Endell Street, London, which was run by the MAB and closed by the military. Subsequently Norah Woodman was transferred as Assistant Matron, to a war Refugees Camp at Earl's Court in Decemebr 1914, being promoted to Matron in 1915. In April 1919 she was elected Matron at the Lambeth Hospital, a position held until March 1945. Woodman received the MBE and a Belgian medal in 1918.
Both worked at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology in Oxford, with Lord Florey. For details of their careers, see, for French, obituaries in the Lancet and the British Medical Journal, and for Sanders, see obituary in The Times, 12th Sept 1980, and biographies of Lord Florey.
It consists of various papers deliberately assembled by Professor Cavanagh on the subject of Minamata Disease, a neurological disorder caused by methyl mercury poisoning of which there was an epidemic at Minamata Bay in Japan in the 1950s due to industrial pollution of the water. It includes a number of original papers accumulated by Dr Douglas McAlpine who conducted the 1958 investigation at Minamata with Dr S Araki of Kumamto, and also later correspondence of Cavanagh with McAlpine himself and others who help to elucidate the nature and causation of the disease in order to discover the various contributions.
R A Ramsay was a general surgeon who held posts to the Metropolitan Hospital and the Belgrave Hospital for Children, both in London. He pioneered the adoption in Britain of Ramstedt's operation for pyloric stenosis in infants. For further biographical details see The Lancet, 1975, ii, 936, British Medical Journal, 1975, ii 413.
Further information on McCance and Widdowson can be found in the volume McCance and Widdowson: a scientific partnership of 60 years, 1933 to 1993, ed. Margaret Ashwell, British Nutrition Foundation, 1993 (GC/97/D.1). See also Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, Vol 41, 1995 (McCance) and Vol 48, 2002 (Widdowson) and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
The Lakeside Health Centre is a practice in London SE2.
John Holden FRCGP (b.1953) was a general practitioner in Haydock, Lancashire, and a partner in the Haydock Health Centre practice.
Born, 1918; educated, Magdalen College, Oxford, 1936-1939; Student House Surgeon and work in Hugh Cairns's Neurosurgical Unit, Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, 1939-1943; BM, Oxford, 1942; House Surgeon for Professor Grey Turner, Postgraduate Medical School, Hammersmith Hospital, 1943; Surgeon Lieutenant, Royal Navy, 1943-1946; Newcastle General Infirmary, 1946-1948; Hospital pathologist, Oxford, 1948-1949; General Practice, Stockton, 1949-1950; General Practice, Redcar, 1950-1973; Professor of General Practice, University of Newfoundland, 1973-1978; Visiting Professor, Glasgow Medical School, 1973; Royal College of General Practitioners Committee on development of oral examination, 1978-1985; Visiting Professor, Dundee Medical School, 1978; Visiting Lecturer, Western Australia Medical School, 1982; Editing Reader's Digest Medical Adviser, 1983-1984, died, 1999.
Publications: Towards Earlier Diagnosis. A Family Doctor's Approach (1963)
David Hutchison MRCGP, FSA (1920-2001) was a general practitioner in Musselburgh, Scotland.
William John O'Connor, MB, ChB (1899-1976) was a general practitioner in High Wycombe, Bucks.
Dr Alfred Model (1906-1979) was a general practitioner in Stockport, Cheshire.