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6th November 1969.
Dear Robert,
I hardly know how to answer your letter of 30th October. I think you have had the main things about my life in so far as they are fit to publish.
I became a Physician in charge of my own Department at the Paddington Green Children's Hospital in 1923 and retired after 40 years. In the course of that time there was a gradual shift in the work of the Department from physical illness to emotional disturbance or to the psychological aspect of the personality if one uses the word psychological without specifically linking it with academic psychology.
At the same time I had an appointment of a similar nature in the decade 1923/33 in the East End at the Queen's Hospital for Children, now Queen Elizabeth's. Here I saw a very large number of patients and was in charge of the L[ondon] C[ounty] C[ouncil] Rheumatism Clinic which dealt with rheumatic fever and chorea and concomitant heart disease. Mercifully this physical syndrome died out in the mid-thirties.
I also had experience in the early twenties of some other very bad epidemics, notably encephalitis lethargica. We also had to deal with very severe summer diarrhoea and various polio epidemics, and of course those were the days before antibotics, so that our wards were full of children with pus in the lungs or the bones or the meninges. Penicillin put a stop to all that and transformed physical paediatrics into something which could afford to look at