My reminiscences of Sir Arthur Hurst

Arthur Hurst was the reason for my going to Guys Hospital, thereby influencing my whole career. When I was at Cambridge in the late 1930s, medical undergraduates could only do the pre-clinical work for a medical degree, and not continue at Addenbrooks Hospital for the clinical training, as Oxford men could do at the Radcliffe. We lived in Edinburgh where my father was a general practitioner (GP). He expected me to go back there to do the clinical phase but my mother, who was an American, had very definite views on how her four sons should have their careers planned. Apparently she told my father “Ian can't possibly go anywhere else but Guys! He must be under Arthur Hurst”. Her determination was due to her admiration of ‘AH’ since the middle of the First World War when in 1916, AH, then a physician at Guys, was selected to start the first hospital in Britain for shell-shocked soldiers and sailors.

There is a great deal about this in his autobiography, where he relates that, after choosing the physicians and psychoanalysts, he chose Arthur Robin, a GP in Sidmouth, Devon with a “charming American wife and four sons, one of whom, Ian, later became my house physician at Guys, which was good training to become a laryngologist”.

So I actually met AH when I was 7 years old, as my father had a practice in Sidmouth from 1909 until 1919 when we all moved to Edinburgh so that we could go to Merchiston Castle School, where he had been. Hereby hangs another part of my life's story!

My first real memory of AH is in 1929 when I was at Clare College, Cambridge, and my brother Alistair was at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth. He was ‘passing out’ there and due to …