It wasn't true to say we didn't have anything to treat patients with. We had morphine and, and its analogues. We had Digitalis and other heart drugs. We had diuretics. We had some, quite a few, antibiotics by the time I was around. I mean, you know, diverting. George Orwell died of tubercle when... not, I didn't look after himself, but in UCH in the private wing when I was a houseman and streptomycin had come in. By the time I was a registrar on chest diseases some years later we had almost the whole panoply of anti tuberculous drugs.

[Q] What an extraordinary time that must have been. Were you aware that it was, there was a, a sort of revolution in the, in the, in the offing or...

No, I don't, I don't think I was actually. I don't think I was, but there were... The second year I was a clinical student, maybe the first year, there was a polio epidemic which was too big for the fever hospitals, and it happened that the, registrar on the firm I was on was allocated to look after this ward. So I went in there a lot and saw rows of people in iron lungs and this was a long time before polio vaccine actually, quite a long time, about 11 years. So there was that kind of experience. I mean people do say, in talking about this to me, they sometimes say, well, you couldn't have had much to do because we haven't got all these drugs but of course in some ways you had more to do. You spent a lot of time aspirating fluid from people's chests and tummies, even their legs, and there were people sitting up in bed with, with valvular heart disease for weeks and months on end and people dying of tubercle and... it, well, it seemed very busy at the time, that's for sure.