Hart of Glyncorrwg -- Moorhead 97 (3): 132 -- Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine

Hart of Glyncorrwg -- Moorhead 97 (3): 132 -- Journal of the Royal Society of MedicineBorn in 1927, Julian Tudor Hart (Figure 1) grew up in a home that served, among other things, as a transit camp for anti-fascist refugees from Continental Europe. His mother, Dr Alison Macbeth, was a member of the Labour Party. His father, Dr Alexander Tudor Hart, belonged to the Communist Party and represented the South Wales Miners' Federation in a dispute over medical care; later he volunteered as a surgeon for the International Brigades fighting against General Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Despite the efforts of his parents to discourage him from entering medicine, Julian's ambition was to be a general practitioner in a coal mining community; but as a medical student in Cambridge and London he recognized the dismal reputation of general practice as the least satisfying and most frustrating field of medicine. If serious-minded students were to be turned to this kind of work, the intolerable features of general practice had to modified.1 New recruits to medicine, he argued, should cultivate disciplined anger against the attitudes and circumstances that impeded effective delivery of medical science to sick people.2 These and subsequent opinions were doubtless coloured by his Marxist convictions. Later in life he expanded on his critique of the medical profession, declaring that medical education was `training the wrong people, at the wrong time, in the wrong skills and in the wrong place'.3/.../