When I qualified in 1967, medicine was much simpler, but becoming more interesting. There were new diuretics (ethacrynic acid and furosemide) which really worked - I'm probably one of the last housemen to have used Southey's tubes for drainage of intractable oedema. We also had new antibiotics such as ampicillin. My surgical skills were minimal, and my first house job was as house surgeon to the cardiothoracic unit at Westminster Hospital, where I clerked the patients, held the retractor and looked after the patients in the postoperative period. This was basically applied physiology - and I enjoyed it. My medical house job was in cardiothoracic medicine, and here I came across my first real taste of what was to become nuclear medicine when we were able to send patients over to University College Hospital (UCH) to have their pulmonary perfusion assessed. Remember, there was no computed tomography (CT), no magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), no ultrasound and little angiography.
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