General practice and the College: 60 years on.

In 1952 the state of general practice in the UK and the rest of the world was dire. Specialist medicine was advancing rapidly, Lord Moran would soon describe GPs as having ‘fallen off the ladder’, and Sir Arthur Thompson stated that general practice was ‘outmoded’. GPs had no training for their job, no body of scientific knowledge, no journal or college of their own. There was not one professor of general practice in the world and one-third of new GPs left their practices, many emigrating. In this crisis, Rose and Hunt1,2 called for a college but Sir Russell Brain3 wrote for the then-three English medical royal colleges stating that there would not be a college for GPs! A steering group of five GPs and five consultants, with chairman Sir Henry Willink, decided otherwise and founded the College of General Practitioners secretly on 19 November 1952.4 This was a unilateral declaration of independence by generalists from specialists.