Medicine
Biomedical Centre London 1972
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1975 - New Technology Saves Babies. When Janet Gisby was admitted to Rochford General Hospital in 1975, the chances were high that, after two miscarriages, she would lose her baby. Fortunately for her, the hospital was able to use the latest in medical technology invented by hospital electronics specialist Dennis Richard. This device constantly monitored her unborn child and provided doctors and nurses with vital information during the delivery. After a fairly short delivery her baby daughter Sharon Linda was born safely. Sadly the original negatives of this story have been lost and the images here scanned from contact sheets. They were taken with a Leica camera under low light levels with an exposure of 1/30th second at f1.4
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Blind boy whose sight was restored by surgery.
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Hip Replacement
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Horder Centre. Despite being crippled by arthritis and confined to a wheelchair herself, Mrs Cecilia Bochenek almost single handedly set up the Horder Hospital at Crowbrough in East Sussex, England. Known as ‘Miss Courage’ Cecelia attracted wide public support for her project which was named after Lord Horder. Pictures show the construction of the Centre to its completion and opening by Princess Margaret. This was a project that I was delighted to become involved with on a pro bono basis. The photographs were taken between 1971 and 1974.
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Man with Stake Through Heart.
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Miracle Boy Footballer
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Dr Jan Corsellis - The Brain Man
In 1963 when I met and photographed him, Dr Jan Corsellis was Consultant Pathologist at Runwell Hospital in Essex.
Runwell was a long-stay mental hospital with a large population of institutionalised patients with neuropsychiatric conditions. At that time very little was known about the causes of mental diseases and many patients had been in hospital for years.
When a patient died, a post mortem was almost always carried out for diagnostic reasons. The original brains in the collection were examined by Dr Corsellis as an integral part of the post mortem. Instead of disposing of the brains after he had examined them, Dr Corsellis retained those that were of diagnostic interest.
Jan Corsellis, started working at Runwell Hospital, a psychiatric unit near Wickford, Essex, in the late 1940s and died in the mid 1990s. He made a huge collection of brains - 8,000 in all.
More than 1,000 came from patients at Runwell and form a unique sub-collection of brains from the mentally ill. Others were taken from patients with senile dementia, head injuries, brain tumours, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and CJD. The collection is now stored at St Bernard’s Hospital in Ealing, West London.
This collection, and other smaller ones, contributed enormously to the understanding of brain disease. The Corsellis collection was used, for example, to demonstrate how boxers become “punch-drunk”, the condition known as Dementia pugilistica.
This led to the wearing of protective headgear by amateur boxers, and a reduction in the number of rounds fought by professionals, which has undoubtedly saved many head injuries.
The Corsellis brain collection was the first in this country. It began as an accumulation of brains that had all been referred for diagnostic reasons. Although every brain was well documented there is uncertainty about the extent to which brains from Coroner's post mortems were collected in the early years, and of any agreements with Coroners.
When I photographed him in the early sixties, I had no idea that just over a decade later I would spend time working at Runwell as part of a third year project for my BSc(Hons) degree. I conducted research into the effects of ECT (Electroconvulsive Therapy) – then widely used for the treatment of severe depression – on memory.
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