Jean Symons remembers collecting historical medical artefacts with her husband, Cecil.

Royal College of Physicians

Jean Symons Edited Cecil Looking At Collection In Boxes

Jean Symons Edited Collection Coming To RCP

Jean Symons Edited Fascinated By History Of Collection

Jean Symons Edited Saying Hello To Cecils Photograph

Jean Symons Edited Tongue Scraper Stilton Cheese Cutter

4 D S Photo Context Cropped

3 C M Gas Masks

2 C M Feelings Pre Covid First Wave Rise In Covid Cases

Martin_Sarner_Domicillary_visits

Ina_Cook_first_day_at_RCP_1932

John_Bishop_treating_convoys_of_wounded_Birmingham_Hospital_WW2

Bill_Frankland_spinning_coin_avoiding_death

Jean_Symons_TB_treatment_1952

Margaret_Turner_Warwick_Education_Medical_Quota

David_Young_Junior_Doctor_Working_Hours

Lord_Platt_meeting_Canadian_High_Commissioner_Moving_Buildings

Norman_Jones_dialysis_early_procedures

Sheila_Sherlock_feminism_women_in_medicineV2

Archibald_Cochrane_first_clinically_controlled_trial

The oral history interview with Charles Fletcher is from the Oxford Brookes Medical Sciences Video Archive, http://www.brookes.ac.uk/library/speccoll/medical/. A copy is held at the Royal College of Physicians. 

Transcription:
Now the first thing was to see if by any chance this drug, which had been so harmless to mice, might be acutely toxic to human beings. And the remarkable thing is the first thing I was asked to do was to find someone who was dying, inevitably dying of some disease, in whom it wouldn't really matter ... if the first injection proved fatal. We wouldn't do it that way nowadays at all, but at that time it was done. And I found a very nice lady who was unfortunately dying of disseminated cancer and I asked if she would mind having an injection of a new drug that might be helpful to people, although I didn't say it would help her, and she agreed to the injection. So Florey came along with an ampule of the drug, with Witts, and we went into the ward, filled this ampule with this yellow fluid, because the extract was yellow in those days from the yellow excretion of the mold from which penicillin was grown, and I got a syringe out and injected it into the vein of the patient. And about 3 hours later she had an acute raise of temperature, she had a rigour fever, so that showed that the penicillin at that time had a pyrogen or something that produces fever in it. And Florey worked away in the laboratory with rabbits to get rid of this, to purify it still further and get rid of it, and then he had a substance from which he had removed the pyrogen as shown with rabbits. And then I had the job of finding out which way this penicillin could be given. Obviously we tried by mouth but it was destroyed in the stomach, we tried by the other end of the alimentary canal, by rectum, and we decided that the only thing we could do with the very scarce supplies then available was to take it intravenously. Now, what about a patient? Well the Radcliffe infirmary like all hospitals had a septic ward and I went down there to find somebody who had a serious infection with a germ which could not be cured by other drugs but penicillin might cure, and there was a policeman there, a delightful man, who had been in having septicemia with boils breaking out all over him, he'd lost one eye from the poison, he had boils all over him and he was in a desperate state, and we started penicillin and it was absolutely miraculous. The next day he said for the first time that he was feeling better, his temperature came down, and so it went on for 4 or 5 days, and then the supplies of penicillin were so scarce that I used to collect his urine in the evening each day and bicycle with it over to the Dunn Laboratory where Chain and Florey would be waiting to hear the latest clinical news, and I would give them this urine and they would extract the penicillin so that the patient could have on the third day the same penicillin he'd had on the first day. But in spite of this it was necessary ... on the third or fourth day the penicillin ran out and it hadn't completed curing his infection. The poor man then deteriorated and died about a week later.

Charles Fletcher Speaks About Penicillin. RCP Oral History Collection

Professor John Williams, director of the RCP's Health Informatics Unit (HIU) discusses the HIU’s  10 year history and achievements to date.

www.rcplondon.ac.uk/hiu

HIU 10th Anniversary - Professor John Williams

Robert Madelin, director general for information society and media at the European Commission offers an EU perspective on Health Informatics at the 10th anniversary event of the RCP's Health Informatics Unit (HIU).

www.rcplondon.ac.uk/hiu

HIU 10th Anniversary - Robert Madelin

Dr John Goldsmith, former general physician and physician to the Artificial Kidney Unit at Sefton Hospital, Liverpool, speaks about his experiences as an interned refugee during World War II.

Transcription: 'On my sixteenth birthday, I saw a policeman walking across the quad to the headmaster’s house and I knew what was coming, because another refugee had been interned and I knew they were coming for me. So I stopped writing the English essay I was writing at the time and the policeman came, very nice, very polite, they took me home, told my mother to pack a suitcase for a few days and I was taken by car to Bury St Edmunds. And after, I don't know exactly how long, we were taken to Huyton near Liverpool to a new camp which only just been finished, but what they did was they surrounded the existing houses, which were not even occupied at that time, they were quite new, with barbed wire. And the youngsters like myself were put in a tent in the garden, whereas the more older people were put in a house. And my house contained three people who subsequently became fellows of the Royal Society; it was a very learned house. Then, one day we were taken by boat to Glasgow and put on another boat, a Polish boat … and taken to Canada.'

Listen to the full interview online: http://rcp.soutron.net/Portal/Default/en-GB/RecordView/Index/61982

Dr John Goldsmith speaks about internment during WWII

Oral history extracts for the RCP Museum website

Dr Norman Jones discusses early dialysis procedures

Bleepers and Junior Doctor Working Practices

Linda Luxon bleepers and junior doctor experiences

Ewa Raglan first pregnancy story

Dr John Bennett MRCP exam path viva

David London Nightingale ward

Ali Jawad talks about establishing medical career in the NHS as an overseas graduate

Rajiv Hanspal Transferring Anatomical Knowledge To UK FINAL

Audio extracts from the Catch your breath exhibition held at the RCP a April - 20 September 2019

CYB John Turner David Young Working Conditions Sheffield Manchester

Audio extracts from the exhibtion 'Under the skin: anatomy, art and identity' 10 October 2019 - December 2020. https://history.rcplondon.ac.uk/event/current-exhibition-under-skin-anatomy-art-and-identity

Barbara Bannister remembers her anatomy teachers at the Royal Free Hospital

James Anderson - Qualities Good Doctor Also Destructive

Ian Gilmore Qualities Needed For Medical Safety

Qualities needed for medical safety

The Royal College of Physicians museum, library, archive and garden. History, medicine, art, exhibitions, Grade I listed architecture in Regent's Park

RCP Museum

Pinned to spotlight

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