A phone call, a pushbike, and a very sick child: Mildmay in the Blitz
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In June 1943, Peter Jones had been a qualified doctor for exactly one day when his phone rang.
On the line was an old school friend, Ian Thomson, who had been working as a house surgeon at Mildmay Mission Hospital in Shoreditch. Ian had been ordered to report to the Royal Army Medical Corps in Aldershot in ten days. His contract at Mildmay overlapped with his military deployment by precisely that amount. He needed a locum he could trust, and he needed one immediately.
Peter packed a rucksack, got on his pushbike, and cycled through the City to the East End.
He arrived to find an area still heavily scarred by the Blitz of 1940-41, the surrounding streets broken by ruins. Ian spent an hour showing him around the 40-bed hospital and then left, but not before handing Peter an immediate problem. Among the patients just admitted was a two-year-old girl with severe abdominal pain. The diagnosis was acute appendicitis. That evening, Peter scrubbed in to assist the visiting consultant surgeon. What they found was worse than expected: a gangrenous, perforated appendix surrounded by active pus. The child had spreading peritonitis.
The operation was successfully completed. The surgeon and the house physician departed for the weekend. Dr Peter Jones - qualified since the previous day - was left in sole charge of a critically ill toddler for the next 48 hours.
In the pre-antibiotic era, peritonitis in a two-year-old was genuinely life-threatening. The inflammation would temporarily paralyse the bowel, meaning the child could not tolerate fluids by mouth. She needed an intravenous drip. Peter had drawn blood from adults, but had never performed the "cut-down" procedure required to place a cannula into the tiny, dehydrated vein of a small child.
With the girl still under ether anaesthesia, he picked up the hospital's copy of Bailey's Surgical Handicraft and read the relevant passage. Following it carefully, he isolated the vein at the inner aspect of her ankle and started an infusion of saline and glucose. Then he waited.
By Saturday morning she was no better; a silent abdomen, a racing pulse. Peter got back on his bicycle and rode through bomb-damaged central London to Lewis's Medical Lending Library on Gower Street, where he borrowed a specialist volume on the abdominal surgery of childhood. He was back at the bedside within the hour, working through the chapter on appendicitis. He managed to obtain ampoules of Sulphapyridine - an early sulfonamide drug, one of the few anti-infective agents available before penicillin became widely accessible - from the dispensary, just before it closed.
On Sunday, checking the child's urine, he found it loaded with sugar. Convinced he had missed a diagnosis of diabetes on top of everything else, he telephoned Dr George Graham, a diabetes specialist in Harley Street who had lectured him during his training. Dr Graham listened and then chuckled. "That will teach you," he said, "that if you give someone glucose through the vein, some will leak out unchanged in the urine."
The girl recovered fully in the days that followed. Peter completed his week at Mildmay and moved on to his official house job - and then to his own wartime service in the army. He carried the memory of those ten days for the rest of his life.
The two friends' lives remained entwined long after 1943. Peter married Ian's sister, Margaret, after the war. Ian served with distinction in the RAMC but developed a brain tumour around 1946, which ended his surgical ambitions. He redirected his career into general practice, joining his father's work at the Islington Medical Mission on Upper Street, and died in 1956 at the age of 38. Peter went on to become Consultant Surgeon at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary and the Royal Aberdeen Children's Hospital, retiring as Emeritus Clinical Professor of Surgery at the University of Aberdeen.
This story comes to us from Anne Golds, daughter of Dr Ian Thomson and niece by marriage to Dr Peter Jones, who shared her family's archive with us. We are grateful to Anne and her cousins for allowing us to tell it.
See this entry in our Staff Stories archive:
Mildmay has been caring for people in east London and beyond for over 160 years.
The commitment that brought Peter Jones cycling through a bomb-damaged city to care for a desperately ill child is the same commitment that drives the work at Mildmay today.
Over 160 years on, we are still here and still caring for some of the most vulnerable people in our community. Still depending on the dedication of our staff, and still depending on the generosity of people like you.
