ABSTRACT
In Britain, formal recognition of the need for a medical specialty in the care and treatment of older people came in the decade after the Second World War. However, the decision to provide consultant posts in geriatric medicine was not taken without some controversy and opposition, and the British example, in the main, has not been followed elsewhere. This chapter draws on a selection of interviews which were carried out with more than 70 men and women who pioneered geriatric medicine in the early years of the National Health Service. I begin with a brief description of the organisation of medical care of older people in the pre-and post-war period and then go on to sketch in the social and medical backgrounds of the interviewees and what led them to gravitate towards care of elderly people. I then consider their accounts of the kind of medical care which hospitalised older people could expect to receive in the 1940s and 1950s. Next I describe the impact which the pioneering work of Marjory Warren, generally acknowledged as the major innovator in the field, had on them and on the development of a medical specialism concerned with treating older people. The interviewees’ accounts of the reactions of physicians and others not engaged in geriatric medicine to that development follows. My final section deals with some of their comments on the impact of the development of which they were a part on the present and future medical care of older people.
