ABSTRACT
In January 1953, 'Foundation Membership' was offered to established General Practitioners who satisfied criteria and within six weeks almost 1700 doctors had joined. In 1951, Dr. Fraser Rose of Preston, and Dr. John Hunt from London, who had served on a Royal College of Physicians' Working Party on General Practice and had important connections in the elite of London medicine, wrote a letter to the British Medical Journal setting out the need for a College of General Practitioners. Even as late as 1958 Lord Moran, then President of the Royal College of Physicians, would describe general practitioners as 'people who fall off the ladder' when giving evidence to a Royal Commission. In 1973 the Journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners published another of our papers comparing the use of topical corticosteroids in the treatment of eczema and psoriasis in general practice.
