It did make me realise that I had a difficulty that I wanted to do medicine very much. I realised that medicine's so big you can never never encompass it and in fact you don't understand a lot of it, but there was another element which I wanted to go into things in greater detail, focus down on them, and I suppose that's why I decided to do medicine as opposed to surgery or whatever as a speciality. We... on, on the sort of personal side one realised the difference between the doctors who taught you, who really were on the side of the patients really, who felt what, what they were up against and the people who didn't. And we're all children of our time, but things like children's wards where, I don't remember the visiting hours, they were probably one hour three times a week or something, and now that would seem to us totally horrifying, but the paediatricians they weren't nasty people, they were kindly people, but we're all... we need some person who says, 'This is awful, you shouldn't do this', and then it changes.

[Q] But, presumably, it was how all sorts of things were being done? I mean, people being taken to... evacuated and such like, it wasn't, there wasn't a feeling that, that the children should always be with their parents like they, they were now.

I suppose that's right, yeah, yeah. I mean... I mean, Joan, my wife, was an evacuee with her twin, with a little box with a gas mask and a label round their wrists saying... and a postcard to send to your parents saying, 'We have arrived at somewhere', but there were other things. I remember in surgical outpatients there might have been 30 students sitting round this surgeon and then he said, 'Oh come with me', and we swept into a room, one of the cubicles and a woman was lying there naked to the... to the waist with a, she had a lump in her breast. I remember thinking, 'This is a terribly, terribly bad thing to do'. I was obviously much too cowardly to say to the surgeon, 'Get out of here, we shouldn't be here'. Obviously I didn't do that. I mean not... I don't know, but obviously anyway I didn't, but I remember thinking at that time there are, there are things that are really wrong about this, about how we're doing it and rather strangely, going to the very end of my clinical career, I got more and more impatient of ward rounds as I got near retirement. You... the people, your juniors and the people who are visiting, very much wanted to be in on the discussion, and I didn't think it was wrong to go in – like everyone these days I went in and said to the patient, 'I've got some students on a visit, would you mind if I bring them in to see you?' and, as you know very well, if you involve the patient in the discussion they're usually only too delighted to be in on the act and tell them, tell people what they think about it. But I, I began to think it was just bad manners. I just thought going in with about ten people just was a kind of... it used to irritate me despite all those caveats and that, in a way, goes back to the beginning, doesn't it?

[Q] And did you find that actually stopped you wanting to teach at the end or... did...

No, I always wanted to teach. I just loved teaching, but that particular bit of it I just, I sort of went against. I didn't like the idea of going into a room with a lot of people.