COMMENT ELD HEALTH ORIGINS AND DESTINY OF BRITISH GERIATRICS*

The British Geriatrics Society originated in a meeting convened 27 years ago by Dr Trevor Howell who believed that a society was needed to promote better standards of clinical medicine for the elderly sick. He invited eight doctors who shared this interest to discuss his ideas, and four of them are still with us. Dr Howell had had a war-time appointment at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, and had collected his clinical experience with the pensioners in a monograph, well known to members of the Society, describing evaluation of physical signs and medical investigation in old age. The geriatric researches he began there were later continued at St John's Hospital, Battersea, with a Nuffield Fellowship. Here he was joined, in 1947, by Dr T. S. Wilson, who made a special study of the investigation and treatment of incontinence and was appointed to the first consultant post in geriatrics in the United Kingdom in 1948. Mr Lionel Cosin, the third survivor, was medical superintendent of Orsett Lodge Hospital in Essex. He had a special interest in physical medicine and his results showed that the average length of bedfast stay of his elderly patients could be reduced from a pre-war average of 260 days to less than 70 by methods of early functional rehabilitatio