Professor Guy Scadding in interview with Sir Gordon Wolstenholme: Part 2

At the start of the interview pioneering respiratory physician Guy Scadding talks of his childhood and his medical training at Middlesex Hospital Medical School, which he compares with the more formalised programmes of the present day. He describes the period between qualifying with conjoint in 1929 and gaining his MRCP and MD (with the University gold medal) in 1932; house jobs at the Middlesex and Connaught Hospital, Walthamstow, and a position at the Brompton Hospital where he became interested in respiratory medicine. Next, Professor Scadding outlines his early career as resident medical officer at the Brompton; the main surgical advances in thoracic medicine in the 1930s, particularly in the treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis and bronchiectasis, and the high level of responsibility he had as the only registrar working with one physician and two surgeons. The interview moves on to his appointment at the Postgraduate Medical School soon after it opened in 1935; Sir Francis Fraser's leadership and recruitment policies, the stimulating intellectual environment he found there, and the need to maintain a private practice in these pre-NHS years. Professor Scadding then speaks about his appointment as consultant at the Brompton in January 1939, and his wartime experiences at the Brompton with the Emergency Medical Service and then in Fahid, Egypt with the Royal Army Medical Corps where he spent three years before returning to Hammersmith and the Brompton in late 1945. He discusses postgraduate education at the Brompton and within the University of London; the development of postgraduate teaching facilities, the Institute of Diseases of the Chest- of which he was dean 1946-60- and its incorporation into the Postgraduate Medical Federation in 1955, and the merger with the Institute of Cardiology to form the National Heart and Lung Institute in 1972. Professor Scadding then reflects on the impact of antibacterial drugs, particularly sulphonamides and penicillin, on respiratory medicine, and relates his experiences as part of the team administering penicillin to Winston Churchill at Carthage in 1943. In the final stages of the interview, he looks back on changes in the incidence and treatment of respiratory disease over the years; the decreasing incidence of tuberculosis and increasing incidence of lunch cancer, and the development of improved tests for respiratory function