After his retirement, he turned his talent for research and writing to the world of local history, in particular of Essex and of maps.Born Adair Stuart Mason in Chislehurst, Kent in 1919, he attended Winchester College and from there went up to Caius College, Cambridge to study Medicine, graduating in 1943. His clinical studies were carried out at the London Hospital Medical College in Whitechapel. He was on duty as a Casualty Officer on the night of the Bethnal Green disaster in March 1943 when 173 people died in a crush to get down to the safety of the tube-station platforms.Following graduation, he served with the Royal Army Medical Corps in India for three years. Initially he was stationed in Calcutta before becoming Officer in Charge of the Convalescent Camp at Darjeeling. When he returned to England he completed his medical studies, gaining his MRCP in 1948 and his MD from Cambridge in 1952.
In 1950 he took up the post of Consultant Endocrinologist at Oldchurch Hospital in Romford, Essex. He was elected to Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians in 1965.In 1952 he travelled to the United States to bring back knowledge of the then relatively new specialty of endocrinology. This study tour led to the development of an endocrine unit at the London Hospital, one of the first of its kind in the UK. It is largely for his work in building up this unit that he will be remembered.He returned to the medical college there first as a lecturer, then senior lecturer, achieving consultant status in 1959.
Generations of medical students fondly recall being taught by him and many more knew of him through his extensive academic writing which included Introduction to Clinical Endocrinology (1957), Endocrinology (1963) and co-editing the 16th and 17th editions of Hutchinson's Clinical Methods (1975 and 1980).In addition to the RCP journal, he founded Clinical Endocrinology in 1972, establishing it as a monthly journal with an international readership, and as honorary editor of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine from 1976 to 1979 he completely revamped a tired publication.His concern for the patient, his own high ethical standards and his belief in the importance of working with all hospital staff as a team were constant themes of his editorials These were never mere words, however. Anyone who worked with him, whether fellow consultant, student doctor or nurse would attest to his desire to put these beliefs into practice daily in the East End of London.He also wanted the wider public to have a better understanding of endocrinology and wrote two popular Penguin paperbacks, Health and Hormones (1960) and Hormones and the Body (1976).His enormous appetite for research and writing found a new outlet after retirement when he combined his love of maps with a devotion to the local history of Essex. In 1990, the Essex Records Office published Essex on the Map and in 1992 a book on the 18th-century zoologist George Edwards followed. He contributed many articles to historical journals and in 1999 won the inaugural Local History Award for his article "Summer Camps for Soldiers in Essex 1778-82" published in The Essex Journal and republished in The Local Historian.David Worsfold. Thursday night's blackout in south-east London was smaller and shorter lived than the recent North American blackout (half an hour as opposed to 30 hours), but the disruption caused by the shutdown of most of the Tube network and many overground trains was severe enough for many of the 250,000 people caught up in it.
Yet we Brits managed to be every bit as stoical as our North American cousins. People discussed alternative travel options with complete strangers. And, with one or two notable exceptions, the media reaction avoided the the cataclysmic warnings that this was just the start of more to come Rightly so. Provided they do not happen often, and efforts are made to learn from failures when they do happen, people accept that one of the prices to be paid for the conveniences of modern life is the fact that they sometimes do not work.If there is any wider lesson of what was inevitably called the "outage" this week, it is not the immediate assumption that we need more generating capacity This is the old "predict and provide" mentality.
