This is an account of my time as a resident student at the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street, from the summer of 1941 until I qualified in June 1942.

The Hospital for Sick Children, founded by Dr Charles West in 1852, was the first children's hospital in the UK. During the second half of the 19th century children's hospitals were set up in other parts of London and in the major cities of England and Scotland, but Great Ormond Street has continued to be the largest, wealthiest, and most influential children's hospital in the country. Until recently, a post at Great Ormond Street was regarded as an essential part of the curriculum vitae of every aspiring paediatrician.

I entered University College Hospital (UCH) in September 1939, but my year was soon evacuated to the Welsh National School of Medicine in Cardiff, to escape the expected bombing of London. At it turned out, this was the time of the “phoney war” and London was not bombed. We returned in August 1940, in time for the “blitz”. Anticipating a continuation of air raids, the medical school was moved to Leavesden Hospital in Abbots Langley for clinical teaching, and to Stanboroughs Hydro, in Garston, near Watford, for lectures and to accommodate the students. The Hydro continued to be run by the owners, the Seventh Day Adventists, who favoured a strictly vegetarian diet, which was only slightly modified during the UCH occupation. For some curious reason, my intestinal tract failed to adapt to the high carbohydrate intake and produced an amount of gas that was physically uncomfortable and socially embarrassing.

I was therefore delighted to be asked, in the summer of 1941, to join the team of UCH students resident at Great Ormond Street. In exchange for helping with air raid casualties …