Here are three of Britain’s most amazing doctors who worked for the NHS from its first day 70 years ago.
And even more remarkably two of them, both in their 90s, are yet to hang up their stethoscopes.
There are around 200 medics still alive who witnessed the birth of the NHS. Most of them have long since retired but not Dr Neville Davis, 93, or Prof Harold Ellis, 92.
Ex GP and police surgeon Dr Davis, thought to be the UK’s oldest practising doctor, is a forensic medical examiner, tackling sex crimes.
Prof Ellis is also still working. He commutes five days a week on the Tube to London’s King’s College Medical School to pass on his knowledge of anatomy and surgery to the next generation of doctors.
They started medical school during the Second World War, not long after the 1942 Beveridge Report, which called for health and social care changes and led to the creation of the NHS.
Studying at the same time to become a doctor was John Marks, who qualified on July 5, 1948 – the day the NHS was launched.
He went on to head the British Medical Association in the late 80s – when Margaret Thatcher began privatising the health service.
Dr Marks, now 90, recalls being thrown in at the deep end in his first job. He was an A&E locum casualty officer at the now-closed St Leonard’s Hospital in Shoreditch, East London. He said: “The days of special training to do various medical jobs were still some way off.
“But jumping in with no experience, being ordered, or expected, to do a procedure you had never done before, by yourself, could be terrifying, as I was soon to discover.” Dr Marks, who became a GP in Borehamwood, Herts, said: “A lot of the time you were on your own. It was nothing like the well-ordered and managed A&E unit we have today.
“The new NHS didn’t have enough staff and so everyone mucked in. On my first night a 90-year-old man came in who couldn’t pee. I admitted him and called a surgeon who decided to operate. I asked where I’d find an anaesthetist, and was told, ‘It’s you.’
“I had never done an anaesthetic by myself. I gave the man an injection to put him to sleep and paralyse his breathing. Then somehow I got the tube in the right place to deliver oxygen to his lungs. But I’m sure if it had gone wrong and he’d died no one would have been blamed for allowing a barely qualified young doctor to give the anaesthetic.”
Dr Marks and his retired GP wife Shirley, 87, who live in St John’s Wood, North London, were followed into medicine by their eldest son Richard, 64, who became a consultant anaesthetist.
Dr Marks was also a leading light in medical politics, crossing swords with then Tory Health Secretary Ken Clarke – who is said to have kick-started the backdoor privatisation of the NHS by introducing competition into its workings.
He said: “I lost my battle with Ken Clarke. But the NHS has always managed to survive despite attempts to tinker with it.
“It’s going through tough times now but back in 1948 we really had very little money.
“We had to scrape by for years. It was about a decade before real money started being injected into the NHS.
“Ever since we have had to continually battle for more cash. Will the health service survive? Yes, my grandchildren will be around to celebrate its 100th birthday. The NHS is one of the greatest achievements in history. Before healthcare in this country was a disaster, particularly if you were poor.
“The unmet needs were not known until the NHS started. People who’d been ill for years came forward for help because they didn’t have to worry about paying for it. I remember my grandmother dying of a broken hip aged 80 just after the Second World War ended and before the NHS came in.
“There was no way of fixing a broken hip then. People just died.
“Within a few years of the NHS starting we had a way of fixing hips.” Prof Ellis, who lives in Finchley, North London, qualified at the age of 22 a month before the NHS started.
He said their salary doubled from £50 to £100 a year and junior doctors lived in the hospital with their boarding and meals paid and their washing done. He recalled: “Even on a pound a week I could save. On two pounds I felt rich.” Prof Ellis noticed a significant improvement in patients’ health, which had been “dreadful” before the NHS.
He said: “In my lifetime I also saw diseases disappear, diseases like tuberculosis and polio that devastated young people. Most doctors today have never seen things that were everyday occurrences for us.
“When I was a student we expected one or two of us would go off each year to the sanatorium with tuberculosis in their lungs.
“Back then a patient aged 75 was considered to be really old. People of 80 or 90 got their pictures in the paper.”
As for Dr Davis, who lives in Hove, East Sussex, his first job was at the now-closed Nelson Hospital in Merton Park, South London – staffed solely by junior doctors. He later became a GP in New Southgate, North London, for 30 years, a police surgeon and trained in forensics. Until ten years ago he did ten-hour shifts tending prisoners in police station cells.
An expert in sexual crimes, rapes and assaults, he is still consulted by lawyers.
He said: “I generally go to my nearest crown court and give evidence on a video link to a court somewhere miles away.
“I’m fit and well and plan to carry for a bit longer. The work hasn’t dried up.”
The General Medical Council said 60 medics who qualified in 1948 still pay a small fee to stay on the medical register as non-practising doctors.