This is a collection from the Royal College of Physicians and Oxford Brookes University of video recordings of biographical interviews with over 130 important figures in clinical medicine and science from the United Kingdom and Australia.
See the Medical Sciences Video Archive webpage for more information.
Please note: the visual quality of this video has been purposefully reduced to keep the file size manageable. There is also some audio interference from the original recording and a slight delay between the audio and the visual aspects of the video.
Dr Stephen Lock, a former editor of the British Medical Journal, 1975-90, discusses his family background, early studies, entry to medicine, first clinical appointments, disillusionment and uneasy transition to a career in medical journalism. His recollections of medical school life, house and registrar appointments provide a critical dissection of established hospital practice in the 1940s and 1950s and a number of senior clinicians. Similarly forthright is discussion of early attachments to The Lancet and BMJ, especially the editors under whom he worked, Sir Theodore Fox and Hugh Clegg. The major challenges and hazards of medical journalism are then considered in some depth, including such issues as editorial pressures, peer review and libel. There follows an account of the founding of the 'Vancouver group' of medical editors, set up to assist standards. In a final section the interview turns to such issues as journalistic campaigning, problems of confidentiality and plagiarism.
Sir Brian Windeyer was professor of radiology (therapeutic) from 1942 to 1969, and dean from 1954 to 1967, at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School. He also served as dean of the Faculty of Medicine of London University from 1964 to 1968, and then vice-chancellor of the University from 1969 to 1972. Sir Brian begins the interview by discussing his Australian family background, education at Sydney Church of England Grammar School, and medical studies at the University of Sydney, where he was also a keen sportsman, rowing in the college crew and playing rugby in the university team. Sir Brian then talks of interviewing prospective medical students when he was dean at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, and of how the admission policy did not rely solely on examination results. The interview moves to the period when he was dean of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of London and the discussions that took place about possible mergers of the medical schools within the University. The interview then retur…
Part One: Penicillin Professor Charles Fletcher was the first doctor to administer penicillin to a patient, when he was working as a Nuffield research student in Professor Leslie Witt's department in Oxford in 1941. In this interview he discusses Howard Florey's and Ernst Chain's work on the development of penicillin at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, Oxford, following its discovery by Alexander Fleming in 1929. Encouraging results obtained from experiments with mice, and increased availability of the drug through improved extraction techniques, led to the first treatment of patients. He then outlines the cases of three patients suffering from bacterial infections, who were given penicillin, and the dramatic results observed. Next, Professor Fletcher tells of the initial scarcity of the drug, and the attempts of Howard Florey and Norman Heatley to interest pharmaceutical companies in America in the large-scale production of penicillin which led to its wider availability. He reflects on how Fleming r…
Part One: Pneumoconiosis In this interview, Professor Charles Fletcher talks of his appointment in 1945 as director of the Medical Research Council Pneumoconiosis Research Unit in Cardiff, set up in response to concern about the incidence of dust-related disease among the coalminers of South Wales, and the consequent loss to the workforce. He acknowledges the early help of Dr Alice Stewart. The interview moves on to the unit's research - comparing the progression of pneumoconiosis in miners who had left the industry with those remaining in the mines. The problems of accurate interpretation of X-rays and the establishment of a radiographic classification of pneumoconiosis are discussed. Professor Fletcher reflects on the results of the study of miners, which identified two different forms of the disease - simple pneumoconiosis and progressive massive fibrosis (PMF) - and found that the former had to be at a certain stage before the progressive disease developed. These results formed the basis of industry compe…
At the start of the interview Dr Nunn, pioneer of respiratory physiology relating to anaesthesia, talks about his family background, his schooldays at Wrekin College and his time as a medical student at Birmingham University. He discusses his three years in Penang, Malaysia with the Colonial Medical Service 1949-1952 where he acquired practical experience of giving anaesthetics. The interview then moves on to Dr Nunn's early career as an anaesthetist, a series of junior posts in Birmingham. There he developed a yearning for research and started a PhD in Birmingham in the field of lung function in anaesthetic and intensive care conditions, moving on to the Royal College of Surgeons as a research fellow where he stayed for seven years. Next the discussion covers the effects of advances in respiratory physiology in the late fifties and early sixties, which undoubtedly aided the dramatic reduction in anaesthetic mortality at that time. Following that, Dr Nunn reflects on his appointments as the first Professor of…
In this, the first of six interviews, Lord Phillips of Ellesmere KBE FRS, reviews the times of his boyhood, parents, family, impressions of Ellesmere in the 1920s and 1930s, early schooling and railway travels. Initial discussion charts the branches of his family, the Phillips, Bagnalls, Finneys and Woods, followed by reference to strong Methodist traditions and his father's service to the local Wesleyan circuit as a lay-preacher. Patterns of life in a cottage 'sandwiched between the local workhouse and the cemetery' emerge, with reference to his father's tailoring workshop and its formative experiences. The story then turns to influential grandparents and cousins, including grandfather Samuel Finney, an early socialist MP in industrial Staffordshire, in whose home in Burslem he was destined to spend time as a rather retiring child. There is also reference to Eglantyne Jebb's family, an aunt influencing the career horizons of a number of relations. Recollections then turn to a tough local primary school regim…