Great Ormond Street 50 years ago.

I was appointed house physician at The Hospital for Sick Children in 1937. In retrospect I can see that I was there at a very particular time in the hospital's history, because 1937 was to mark the end of an era. A decade or so before, the fame of Great Ormond Street had depended on a generation of physicians of the calibre of Still, Garrod, Batten, and Poynton. But the staffing of the hospital and the way the work on the medical side was carried out had changed but little in the 20 years between the wars. Change, however, was afoot and by the following year, 1938, the picture was at last beginning to alter, as will be explained. I was one of only two house physicians, and my appointment was to Drs E A Cockayne and Donald Paterson. These two gentlemen had not been on speaking terms for years. So they had come to a tacit agreement whereby each took it in turn to appoint the shared house physician. House physician jobs at Great Ormond Street were highly competitive, and it was understood that to stand much chance of success an applicant should have the Membership of the Royal College of Physicians, and should also demonstrate his keenness by having made one or more previous applications. I did not have the Membership, and indeed was very junior, having been qualified less than a year. However, I did possess one crucial asset-I came from the right medical school, the Middlesex, for Dr Cockayne, whose turn it was to appoint, was 'on' at the Middlesex as a general physician. Hospital chauvinism was a powerful force and to it, unworthily, I owe my entry to Great Ormond Street. The two chiefs I found myself working for each had a ward of about 26 cots, but the two firms had little else in common. The senior of the two, Dr Cockayne-Cocky-was a shy eccentric; it was my loss that I never felt able to get onto his wavelength, or to know how to respond to the curious little giggles which accompanied the remarks that he would drop, often after a disconcertingly long silence, in the course of his twice weekly ward round. But my successor, Dick Bonham-Carter, became a devotee of his, and says: 'Cockayne was an Edwardian bachelor, who did not care for women. This attitude was compounded by the fact that he had to teach female medical students from the Royal Free Hospital at Great Ormond Street. Furthermore he had had rooms in Lancaster Gate when the building had been bought by London University and turned into a female students' hostel. He was very fond of children, but his life and his original work were devoted to genetics. His OBE was awarded for his work in entomology; he was President of the Royal Entomological Society, having made his name by cataloguing the Rothschild's collection of British moths, a genetic study. In human genetics his Inherited Diseases of the Skin and Appendages was a classic. His knowledge and memory were remarkable. A physician at Hammersmith Hospital rang up to ask me to tell Dr Cockayne that he had admitted an 18 year old girl with pseudo-xanthoma elasticum. "That will be Vera Green," he said, and of course it was. He was intrigued by my own pedigree, because I had an English name but a Scottish home. "Poltallock, Argyll?" he said, "Ah, yes, the white woodcock in the Natural History Museum." (It was shot and presented to the Museum by my grandfather.) No wonder I was fond of him and thought he had the best intellect on the staff at Great Ormond Street. But he was odd.' I saw far more of my other chief. Donald Paterson was a Canadian who, armed with the vigour, confidence, and drive that were considered to be typical of the products of the New World, had come to this country when quite young. In no time he had established himself as the best known children's physician (no one then called himselfa paediatrician), had written several books, and published plenty of papers-mostly pot-boilers, for he was no medical scientist. He ran a flourishing practice from his house in Devonshire Place, at a time when no other physician was able to make a living if confining his practice to children. To the archaic atmosphere then pervading the medical wards at Great Ormond Street, DP brought a whirlwind of activity-stimulating without being inspiring, was Dermod MacCarthy's not unfair description. His ward sister, Sister Manley, had