Talk:Maurice Henry Pappworth

Army service
Pappworth does not seem to have been commissioned earlier than 1942 -

A Sydney Pappworth was commisisoned in 1940, and promoted in 1941,

David Underdown (talk) 14:07, 6 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Hi. Forgive my ignorance on the subject, but does that mean that the first London Gazette piece contradicts our article? He would have joined the Corps and been made a Lt. right away? Steve  T • C 22:21, 6 August 2009 (UTC)


 * No, he'd have had some preliminary training before being commissioned. The question is whether that training could have taken so long that he started in 1941 and was commissioned in late 1942. If that seems unlikely, then it casts doubt on the 1941 start date for his RAMC service. Perhaps he was called up in some other capacity in 1941, and transferred into the RAMC in 1942? - Pointillist (talk) 22:45, 6 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks, understood now. I'll trawl the sources and any others I might find to see if they clarify the issue. Steve  T • C 22:59, 6 August 2009 (UTC)


 * By this time in particular, any initial training would have been pretty perfunctory I suspect, medical officers were non-combatants, so I don't think they received much weapons training or anything, and of course he'd long completed his medical studies by this time. Medical officers are directly commissioned, even now they only go througha short course at Sandhurst, rather than receiving the full trianing given to line officers.  Sorry I didn't make my initial comment clearer.  It ought to be possible to find his later promotions as well, but the search function can be a bit hit and miss due to the scanning and conversion process used.  David Underdown (talk) 09:31, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Comments from personal experience
I cannot put any of this into Papworth's page, nor into the page on the Royal Postgraduate Medical School, but I hope these comments will help. I attended the RPGMS in the early 1970's, and it was clear to me that things were being done to patients without their knowledge and there was no ethics committee at all. I brought this up, respectfully, but the result was damaging, to say the least. With regard to Papworth, he was indeed an angry man, and rightly so, but he was not a great medical teacher, nor did he ever claim to be one. I saw and heard him in action, what he drummed into his classes was that the MRACP exams were a trial of gamesmanship, that had nothing to do with the good practice of medicine. He said that he would show his class how to pass the oral exams, and he did it well. I was an usher at those exams at the Royal Free Hospital. The applicants were expected to make "Snap diagnoses" literally from the end of the bed, in what I termed "Smart Alec medicine". As far as racism was concerned, it was not limited to Jews either. Once at the exams at the RFH I saw 2 examiners mocking a Pakistani candidate and deliberately confusing him with misleading and confusing questions. As it happened, the President of the Royal College of Medicine was also the chief physician of the RFH at the time and the chief censor (examiner). Prof. Sherlock was a world renoun authority on liver disease and highly respected by all. She was also a very direct lady who stood no nonsense and she set very high standards for the practice of medicine and for the behaviour of doctors. She stood and listened to the disgraceful matter in progress and beconed to me. "Who are you"? I told her and she said "What is happening here" (The candidate was by then trembling and near to tears). I told her what I had seen and she stepped in and said to the 2 examiners "Gentlemen, it is tea time". "One moment, we are not quite finished here" came the reply. "Oh yes you are, finished for now and forever". She took the candidate aside and apologised and asked him to come to her the next day for her morning ward round. At the end, she said "Congratulations doctor, you have passed". I was so proud of her, but the examination of candidates continued to be a demeaning and inappropriate process for decades. Historygypsy (talk) 03:24, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

Personality
The obituary by Stephen Lock (editor of the British Medical Journal) on the Royal College of Physicians website (link on main page) makes much of his difficult personality. He seems to have been unusually acerbic, and probably not just to his subordinates, and somewhat a loner. This probably accounts for his being able and willing to blow the whistle and stand up to vilification by his peers. At least he was able to make a living in the Home Counties and Harley Street, without having to emigrate to New Zealand like Stephen Bolsin.

Regarding his qualifications, he was one of the few who got their MB ChB with honours: a rare distinction, which implies doing very well in the examinations throughout the course, and not just the finals. According to the Medical Directory he got his MD in 1937, the year after his MRCP London: he would have written the entry himself.

The stuff about not being able to secure a teaching hospital appointment because he was Jewish sounds exaggerated if one thinks about his early boss Henry Cohen and also Max Rosenheim, both of whom became professors of medicine and eventually hereditary peers, the former in Liverpool. The latter became President of the Royal College of Physicians. On the other hand Noah Morris had a similar experience on being appointed professor of materia medica in Glasgow in the same pre-NHS era: the physicians at the various voluntary hospitals all refused to allow him to join them and the City Corporation's Medical Officer of Health had to give him beds at a former Poor Law hospital (Stobhill), which was thus transformed into a teaching institution. At that time politicians in both cities, which had substantial Catholic minorities, "played the Orange card," which may have enhanced the antisemitism of the age.

He wrote another book, on "Passing Medical Examinations", which is probably obsolete in the era of multiple choice questions and actors pretending to be patients. He was unsparing in his criticism of the examiners of his day. Like many who have passed examinations themselves, he was scornful of those gained clinical appointments on the basis of their prowess in the laboratory and were awarded diplomas without examination through the old boy network. His advice was unconventional: e.g. "write a lot" - he claimed many examiners seemed to mark answers by weight, "suck a subject dry", "no headings" - don't do the examiner's work for him, "don't number your points" - so when you remember something more important you can add "more important than the above ..." and so on. I can see how that could have annoyed markers, but it seems to have worked.

All of his books start off with heavy emphasis on Jewish ethics before moving onto secular medical ethics, the Nuremberg code and later documents. I don't know if this was part of his everyday talk: if so it could have ruffled feathers in the days when Jews were kept out of golf clubs.

I won't put any of this into the main article as I have not read the biography by his daughter which I have just discovered was published posthumously last year. NRPanikker (talk) 15:25, 18 February 2019 (UTC) NRPanikker (talk) 12:57, 12 August 2019 (UTC)