Confessions of a Doctor. Stanley Feldman
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neighbouring communities, but it was not an easy job to persuade apprehensive local families to take in unknown children from the capital as, generally speaking, London children had an undeserved reputation for being difficult, dirty urchins. However, with the promise of extra ration books, volunteers slowly come forward to meet the challenge. This did not solve the school’s other problem – how to accommodate the ugly ducklings – three boys – in a girls’ school.
I can remember the confusion as the three of us were segregated, given supper and put to bed in a small room off the main hall; I think it was probably the sanatorium. It was one of the older boys who found the notice over our beds that proved to be the cause of our fall from grace. It read, ‘If in the night you need a mistress press this bell’. As very much the youngest of the trio it was only many years later that I came to understand why the other boys found ringing the bell, well into the night, to be the cause of so much amusement.
The next day we were moved out of Roedean School. It was to be the start of a peripatetic school career. At first I was sent to a local council school but, when that was considered to be too far away from our temporary accommodation, another rather posh school, where Latin was de rigueur, was found for me. Unfortunately, I did not stay long enough to master the elements of this subject, a lapse I was to come to regret in later life.
It was not long before the German bombers found the English coast and the sound of anti-aircraft guns kept us awake at nights. So, from Brighton we were moved to Dunstable in Bedfordshire; from Dunstable back to London; from London to South Wales and then to Luton. It seemed that whenever I settled down in a new school, someone in Hitler’s high command would know and off would go the bombers, prompting another move, yet one more new school. Eventually, completely fed up with the disruption to my schooling, my parents decided that it was time to return to London; it was time for the chaps in the German high command to get busy once again; it was the time of the buzz bombs and V2 rockets. It was 1944-45.
SCHOOLS AT WAR
Towards the end of the war, those schools that remained operational in London were kept open by a makeshift staff of retired teachers and part-time volunteers. My school, the Sloane School in Chelsea, had a very restricted range of teachers, none of whom taught mathematics or science. As my interest lay in science I found it necessary to pursue the greater part of my studies at Chelsea Polytechnic evening classes.
At the age of 16, I found myself spending four nights every week, from 6.00pm until 9.00pm, at the polytechnic as well as attending regular day school. While far from ideal, Chelsea Polytechnic introduced me to an academic environment and to true scholarship. Many of the teachers were recruited from other colleges in the University of London that had been bombed and were no longer operational. Most of the students were mature and many held down working jobs during the day. At that time Chelsea was very much an art college and was associated with its famous Chelsea Arts Club and the New Year’s Eve Ball, but it also had good departments in biological sciences and physics. It was to be my initiation into a grown-up world.
It was while I was at the Chelsea Polytechnic that I became interested in research, in knowing why and how the systems that keep living things alive worked. I set about solving some of nature’s puzzles, such as how bivalves and molluscs – like the oyster and mussel – keep the two halves of their shell tightly closed, defying brute force and the advantage of leverage when one attempts to open them; and how fish manage to obtain sufficient oxygen to meet their needs from the little that is present in water. So it was that at the age of 20, I had my first communication to a scientific journal published, in a letter to Nature.
As a result of the enthusiasm I had displayed in these studies I was co-opted as the note-taker for a small committee that was formed towards the end of the war to investigate the weevil infestation of flour. The committee came to the considered view that it would be inadvisable to remove the weevil contamination as, at that time, it constituted a significant contribution to the protein intake in the diet of the population. Although the protein ration per person had been carefully calculated by the rationing authorities, no allowance had been made for the British sacrificing their precious rations to keep their army of pets well nourished. The decision of the committee was kept a secret from the public lest they stopped eating bread!
Once I obtained my degree it was suggested that I carried on doing research for a PhD degree. I was flattered and eager to start on my thesis but my enthusiasm was deflated by the subject that was chosen: the nitrogen metabolism of the woodlouse! How did the animal build up its bodily protein if it lived in an environment devoid of nitrogen and composed entirely of cellulose? My adolescent visions of Nobel Prize ceremonies, of saving lives, of public lectures and honours all seemed a long way off from the protein metabolism of the woodlouse. If I was to win fame and fortune, if I was to become a new Pasteur or Curie, I had to try a different tack. Inspired by the hero of A J Cronin’s book The Citadel I decided I would become a doctor.
It was not easy to get into medical school at the end of the war, as a minimum of 70 per cent of student places was reserved for those returning from the armed forces. Fortunately there were no qualms about giving the majority of the remaining places to men rather than to women. The Women’s Liberation Movement and the Equal Rights laws had yet to make any impact on those selecting the future doctors and dentists for the country. Indeed, many Deans were unabashed misogynists.
One Dean explained that he believed that if a girl was good-looking she did not need a career in medicine and if she wasn’t, then medicine wasn’t enough! Their prejudice gave me a chance of a place in this highly competitive system, and in 1951, at the age of 21, I was fortunate to win a scholarship to Westminster Medical School to train to be a doctor.
Like several other ancient medical establishments, Westminster Medical School had no pre-clinical teaching facilities. This meant studying anatomy, physiology and biochemistry at the nearby King’s College in the Strand. Although King’s had some excellent science departments, the college had been founded as a religious seminary and even in the 1950s science was considered far less important in the teaching hierarchy than religion and law.
KING’S COLLEGE LONDON
In the post-war era most medical schools were a mix of MASH and Doctor in the House, and the large numbers of ex-service students created a racy environment of mature men who had spent many years in the armed forces. They were naturally rebellious when confronted with any petty restriction, always ready to ‘have a go’. They were bloody-minded and not easily browbeaten by the urbane superiority of eminent, successful consultants, who, with their large Harley Street practices and equally large incomes, were more used to dealing with errant servants than ex-soldiers. But, before qualifying to walk the wards with the ‘Sir Lancelot Sprats’ of the medical establishment, there was anatomy, physiology and biochemistry to master.
We were divided into groups of three in the anatomy department at King’s College. Each group was designated to work on a particular part of a formalin-smelling, leathery-coated, shrunken corpse. Contrary to popular belief, the bodies appeared totally inanimate and were treated as such. There were few ribald jokes and little, if any, inappropriate treatment of the bodies; they could just as well have been made of wax. Each group of three students set about dissecting a limb or the abdomen, the thorax or the head and neck. One of the groups would hold the dissection manual and read out the instructions while the other two would take turns with the scalpel and forceps. Every nerve, fibre, muscle and tendon were carefully separated and displayed so that a mental note could be noted of its origins, destination and position relative to other structures. Each week a demonstrator, usually a surgeon in training, would test us on what we had learnt.
After the bodies were dissected and reduced to their basic bits and pieces, each carcass was returned to its particular wooden box. But, as it had to weigh the same as it did when it was delivered, there was invariably a hunt around for ‘make weight’ pieces of wood and bone before the box lid was finally sealed down.
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