An interview with Professor David Yates.

Tell us something of your background and early training I was bought up in Yorkshire, and trained at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and St Thomas’, qualifying in 1966. My first experience of casualty was as a house physician in Scarborough. On my first weekend there was a phone call for Dr Yates—at Thomas’ they rather pretentiously called house surgeons Mister, so this was my first week of being a Doctor. I was told there was a patient in casualty I needed to see. I said “ask the casualty oYcer because I am very busy”. I was told “You don’t understand, the house physician for the weekend also does casualty”. This was my first introduction to casualty, there had been no mention of it in the job description, or at the interview, or in my first week on duty. It was pretty well a baptism of fire. Then I went to Zambia for six months in the flying doctor service. My first real A&E job was at Cambridge. There were a couple of us who stood out as being quite abnormal as we actually enjoyed A&E. Later I became a surgical registrar at Chichester. We did all sorts, from a bleeding tonsil to an extradural. I became quite interested in head injury at that point. We didn’t do any aortic aneurysms; they were all sent oV in an ambulance to St George’s, I remember.